Karen Stenner, the author of “The Authoritarian Dynamic,” pointed out that the Rentfrow study found that red state voters were simultaneously “friendly” and less “socially tolerant.”

Stenner explained this seeming contradiction by noting that

it is a lot easier to be generous and considerate and civic-minded and invested in one’s community if one’s community is full of people much like oneself. The kinds of behaviors we get out of authoritarians depend critically on how and where they have drawn the boundaries of “us” and “them.” They can be very attentive to “us,” but also tend to be very particular about whom “us” includes.

John Jost, a professor of psychology and politics at N.Y.U., expands upon the implications of the word “conscientiousness” in describing red state voters:

Conscientiousness is correlated with measures of racism, sexism, homophobia, prejudice, authoritarianism, social dominance, and system justification. I suspect that this personality factor has more to do with a need for order or desire for rule-following, which can easily take an authoritarian turn, than other aspects of conscientiousness that we might associate with, say, honesty or integrity.

In the opposite corner from Jost, Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at Vanderbilt and a co-author of the 2009 book “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics,” said he has abandoned use of the word “authoritarian” because he views it as excessively pejorative. In place of authoritarian, Hetherington said he will now use the phrase “fixed worldview.”

“The adherence to established traditions, what scholars derisively call conventionalism, is very much a characteristic of high conscientiousness,” Hetherington wrote:

Whether you think this is good or bad probably depends on what you think of community norms. In my view, there is a lot of good to many of them. Fixed worldview people want to protect them.

Hetherington added a cautionary note:

Here is the problem though. If you are perceived as outside that community, the enforcement of those norms isn’t going to feel very good.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, raised a crucial if obvious point: Primary season Trump voters do not represent all Republican voters.

We can’t really know, just on the basis of this paper, whether these traits apply to Trump voters. All we can know is that these traits are more common in states and regions that voted for Trump. It is possible that the people who most show the positively valenced personality traits did not have Trump as their first choice in the primary, but then, once the general election came around, most of them voted for the Republican candidate, which is what partisans do in our two party system with very little party switching.

Haidt cited an essay that he and Emily Ekins, the director of polling at the Cato Institute, published in February 2016, “Donald Trump supporters think about morality differently than other voters.” In contrast to Republican primary voters who supported candidates other than Trump, they noted, voters who supported him “score high on authority/loyalty/sanctity and low on care.” These voters, according to Ekins and Haidt, “are the true authoritarians — they value obedience while scoring low on compassion.”

Matt Motyl, a political psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argued in an email that in the general election, the

typical Trump voter is not a raging, screaming white nationalist; the typical Trump voter is not much different from the typical Romney, McCain, or Bush voter. They are just ordinary Republicans.

There is, however, a subset of Trump supporters “who are extraordinarily vocal in their intolerance and white nationalism,” according to Motyl. These activists have become “the template of the stereotype of Trump voters,” he wrote. “As is the case for many stereotypes,” he added, “there is a grain of truth, but the grain of truth is just that — a grain.”

In fact, authoritarian voters with a sense of besieged white identity are more than a “grain” in the Republican electorate.

There were enough of them to provide the hard-core base of support to Trump at the start of the Republican primaries, a base that proved large enough to give Trump pluralities in the early contests.

And the clout of the authoritarian, white identity wing of the Republican Party is such that Trump is governing to please this wing first and foremost.