TF

Exactly. So my old colleague Ben Page and I set out to analyze the American National Election Survey data afresh. We compiled a lot of data about congressional districts and related this to the survey data. My colleague Jie Chan and several of Ben’s students eventually joined us. Our first, somewhat preliminary, paper is now out as a working paper.

We agree completely with the studies that find racial resentment and gender considerations played substantial roles in the election outcome. We also concur that the political discussion and reception of the Affordable Care Act was heavily racialized — that really stands out when you study the survey data.

But we also find compelling evidence of the importance of economic issues. In the Republican primaries, for example, Trump’s support for import restrictions clearly distinguished him from the rest of the Republican field and helped gain him votes. The importance of feelings about the US being on the “wrong track” is also apparent. That likely reflects some economic considerations, though economics alone hardly exhausts its content.

When we analyze voting by congressional districts, especially changes in the presidential vote from 2012 to 2016, the importance of economic issues also stands out. Some of these factors are not obvious, unless you are familiar with recent studies of Brexit and German voting in the early 1930s, such as the importance of fiscal austerity in pushing voters to the right.

We find that economic considerations played a major role in the decisions of “switchers” — people who voted for Obama in 2012 but then voted for Trump; 2012 non-voters who came in from the cold to vote for the real-estate mogul; and last, 2012 Obama voters who didn’t vote in 2016. Limits on imports and, in the case of non-voters in 2012 who ended up casting ballots for Trump, beliefs that the government should take a more active role in sustaining peoples’ income both played a role.

We also find very direct evidence that the Clinton campaign’s relatively weak emphasis on policy as opposed to candidate qualifications cost it the votes of 2012 Obama voters. Many just did not perceive a meaningful difference between the major parties. Disappointment with the meager aid the Affordable Care Act actually provided individuals also appears to have influenced many of these dropouts.

We also discovered something else that has really interesting implications. In the earlier paper on money and the election that Paul Jorgensen, Jie Chen, and I wrote, we pointed out that in the final weeks of the campaign a wave of Republican spending on endangered Senate races dramatically turned many around, preserving Republican control of the Senate. The striking result was that for the first time in American history the party that won the Senate races also won the state’s presidential vote — with no exceptions.

Conventional election analysts barely noticed. If they did, they made nothing of it. But this led us to suggest that strong correlated efforts (often led by statewide parties) helped pull Trump across the finish line in some states where he was close.