Social scientists are keenly aware that the world is exceedingly complex, that virtually all social phenomena are multivariate. Understanding Trump’s supporters is no exception. We must consider an array of interrelated factors to account for this unprecedented election – demographic and individual factors that constituted the tinder for the explosion and the actual igniting factors that lit the fire. Research on the topic demonstrates that numerous theories and concepts of social psychology prove centrally important in helping to understand this unexpected event. But no claim is made that these social psychological factors provide in themselves a complete explanation. Obviously, key political variables are also involved ( Norpoth, 2016 ), and these are intertwined with the social psychological variables to be evaluated in this paper.

The Tinder TOP]

The Trump movement is not singular within the United States (the Know Nothing movement in the 1850s, the Wallace movement in the 1960s, and the more recent Tea Party Movement). Moreover, other democracies have seen similar movements (e.g., Austria’s Freedom Party, Belgium’s Vlaams Blok, France’s National Front, Germany’s Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), and Britain’s U.K. Independence Party (UKIP). In virtually all these cases, the tinder especially involved male nativists and populists who were less educated than the general population. But this core was joined by other types of voters as well. Five highly interrelated characteristics stand out that are central to a social psychological analysis – authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, outgroup prejudice, the absence of intergroup contact and relative deprivation.

Prejudice TOP] Many outgroup prejudices characterize dedicated Trump’s followers, not just anti-immigrants, but anti-outgroups in general. Since Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” the Republican Party has employed strategies that appeal to bigotry with “dog whistles” – somewhat subtle codewords for race and other minorities designed to be heard by racists but not by non-racists. Nixon opposed racial school desegregation by claiming to be against the “bussing” needed to achieve interracial schools. Ronald Reagan began his campaign in 1980 by giving a “states’ rights” speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi quite near where three civil rights workers had been lynched earlier. George H. W. Bush in 1988 ran a campaign ad of an African-American murderer that his opponent had released from jail – an ad for which his campaign manager later apologized. The 2008 presidential campaign witnessed recurrent Republican slips that betrayed traditional racist thinking (Pettigrew, 2009; Staples, 2008). One Republican club issued false ten dollar bills with Obama’s picture accompanied by stereotyped African-American food - a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried chicken. The McCain campaign ran an advertisement claiming that Obama had been “disrespectful” to Governor Palin – the old Southern term recalling sanctions against Black men interacting with White women. Republican Representative Lynn Westmoreland described Obama and his wife as “uppity.” And Republican Representative Geoff Davis called the then-47-year-old Obama, “Boy.” Trump is less subtle. He has repeatedly made unconcealed use of prejudice against outgroups ranging from “dangerous” Muslims to Mexican “rapists.” His dedicated followers loved it; breaking with so-called “political correctness,” he blared openly what they had been saying privately. Not surprisingly, then, support for Trump correlates highly with a standard scale of modern racism (r = +.48; Van Assche & Pettigrew, 2016). And once again a European study is congruent with this American finding. Billiet and De Witte (2008) found that prejudice against immigrants was the single most important predictor of support for the far-right Vlamms Blok Party in Flemish Belgium. Data from France’s 2012 presidential election strongly indicates that the racist National Front campaign of Marine Le Pen moved perceptions of social norms to the political right (Portelinha & Elcheroth, 2016). It appears that Trump, too, has eroded norms that proscribed intolerant speech and behavior. Racist graffiti, threats and hate crimes all rose sharply following Trump’s election victory (Reilly, 2016). In addition, pre-election publicity that minorities were planning to vote in large numbers for Clinton undoubtedly stirred Republicans to turn out too. In fact, the African-American turnout fell below that of 2008 and 2012 – a key factor in Clinton’s narrow losses in North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Intergroup Contact TOP] A major means of reducing intergroup prejudice is through optimal intergroup contact (Pettigrew, 1998; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006, 2011). So it is noteworthy that there is growing evidence that Trump’s White supporters have experienced far less contact with minorities than other Americans. For instance, Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016, p. 14) found that “...the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” This finding remains true for both non-Hispanic Whites in general and for the smaller subset of White Republicans. And this lack of intergroup contact result emerges while controlling for dozens of other variables. Consistent with this finding, these researchers also found that Trump support increased as an area’s distance from the Mexican border increased. Throughout the world, intergroup contact has been shown typically to diminish prejudice by reducing intergroup fear and inducing empathy (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008, 2011). Its extreme absence for most Trump fans is an important factor that has been virtually ignored in the post-election analyses. Interestingly, a similar finding emerged in research on the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote to leave the European Union (EU). The extent of voters’ social networks and their propensity to travel beyond their hometown had stronger negative effects than income in shaping their nationalistic, populist, anti-immigrant support for leaving the EU. But those who had spent time with a foreigner were 15% less likely to have voted to leave (Maguire, 2016). We return later for further analysis of the Brexit vote.