By John Ray (@johnlray) and Sean McElwee (@SeanMcElwee)

Summary

Media narratives often present Trump’s success as the product of a populist politics. Since his election, many rust-belt diners have had their breakfast interrupted by reporters eager to suss out the secret to Trump’s success. Here we present results from our What The Hell Happened Survey of 3,215 voters, weighted to be nationally representative of the electorate using Catalist’s voter file. We find that racial animus, not populism, predicts support for Trump in 2016 and Congressional Republicans in 2018. We also find that Obama-Trump voters are motivated in part by populism but also racial animus, and the voters who moved back into the Democratic column in 2018 were also more populist than Obama-Trump voters who did not.

Populism and Partisan Vote Choice

Respondents in Data for Progress’ What The Hell Happened? survey were asked several items drawn from a well-tested set of items in the academic literature designed to measure populist sentiment. Specifically, our populism items asked respondents to indicate the whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statements:

It doesn't really matter who you vote for because the rich control both political parties.

The system is stacked against people like me.

I'd rather put my trust in the wisdom of ordinary people than in the opinions of experts and intellectuals.

In political science there is some debate as to whether populism or racial animus was the prime motivator of support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Including popular and validated measures of both populism and racial animus permit us to test which of the two factors was the stronger predictor of Trump vote choice in 2016 and House vote choice in 2018.

To measure racial animus, we built a similar scale out of responses to items in our survey that academics use to measure racist attitudes. We drew from a variety of different political science measures of racism, specifically, we asked respondents to “indicate the extent to which [they] agree with each of the following statements.”*

Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for African Americans to work their way out of the lower class.

I am angry that racism exists.

Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.

Racial problems in the U.S. are rare, isolated situations.

White people in the U.S. have certain advantages because of the color of their skin.

For each statement, respondents were asked to strongly agree, somewhat agree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree or if they had no opinion. For the “Generations of slavery…,” “I am angry…,” and “White people in the U.S….” items, the “strongly disagree” position is the position associated with higher levels of racial animus, while the “strongly agree” position is associated with lower levels of racial animus. For the “Irish, Italian, Jewish,....” and “Racial problems in the U.S….” items, the “strongly agree” position is the position associated with higher levels of racial animus.

To compare the importance of these two underlying constructs in predicting 2016 vote choice for Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans in 2018, we included both our populism scale and our racial animus scale in a multivariate general linear model along with “usual suspects” demographic and political variables including party ID, sex, race, education, family income, and age, and weights to represent the 2018 electorate. The results presented here are robust to recoding party ID as a two-way, three-way, or the full Strong Democrat through Strong Republican 7-point scale, and the same is true concerning the various recoding options for the race, education, income, and age. We ran the same analysis to predict 2016 Trump vote choice for the full sample, Millennials, and non-Millennials, and 2018 House vote choice for the full sample, millennials, and non-millennials.

The following charts present predicted probabilities of voting for Trump in 2016 or voting for a House Republican in 2018 by change in the racial animus scale. In each pane, the predicted probabilities are presented for change in the racial animus scale holding numeric variables to their mean, and categorical variables to their modal values.

In contrast, the populism scale was generally a less successful predictor of vote for Trump in 2016 or a House Republican candidate in 2018. The coefficient on the populism scale was statistically insignificant and substantively null, with a one-point change on the three-point populism scale associated with a 0.7 percent increased chance of voting for Trump (+/- 0.04).