Saturday, March 12, 2016

The Geography of Trumpism

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      The Geography of Trumpism

      New York Times6 hours ago
    • Photo
      Donald Trump at Lakefront Airport in New Orleans last week. Credit Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times
      When the Census Bureau asks Americans about their ancestors, some respondents don’t give a standard answer like “English” or “German.” Instead, they simply answer “American.”
      The places with high concentrations of these self-described Americans turn out to be the places Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has performed the strongest.
      This connection and others emerged in an analysis of the geography of Trumpism. To see what conditions prime a place to support Mr. Trump for the presidency, we compared hundreds of demographic and economic variables from census data, along with results from past elections, with this year’s results in the 23 states that have held primaries and caucuses. We examined what factors predict a high level of Trump support relative to the total number of registered voters.
      The analysis shows that Trump counties are places where white identity mixes with long-simmering economic dysfunctions.
      The places where Trump has done well cut across many of the usual fault lines of American politics — North and South, liberal and conservative, rural and suburban. What they have in common is that they have largely missed the generation-long transition of the United States away from manufacturing and into a diverse, information-driven economy deeply intertwined with the rest of the world.
      “It’s a nonurban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not people who have moved around a lot, and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.”
      Continue reading the main story

      The 10 Variables Most Closely Linked to a County’s Support for Donald Trump

      A correlation of 1 means the variable is a perfect indicator of Trump support.* Negative correlations are shown in red.
      Variable Correlation
      White, no high school diploma
      0.61
      “Americans”
      Percent reporting ancestry as “American” on the census
      0.57
      Mobile homes
      Percent living in a mobile home
      0.54
      “Old economy” jobs
      Includes agriculture, construction, manufacturing, trade
      0.50
      History of voting for segregationists
      Support for George Wallace (1968)
      0.47
      Labor participation rate
      –0.43
      Born in United States
      0.43
      Evangelical Christians
      0.42
      History of voting for liberal Republicans
      Support for John B. Anderson (1980)
      –0.42
      White Anglo-Saxon Protestants
      Whites with European non-Catholic ancestry
      –0.42
      * Measuring Trump support as Mr. Trump's percentage of the primary vote times the Republican share of the two-party vote in the 2012 presidential election.
      Mr. Trump has his share of support from the affluent and the well educated, but in the places where support for Mr. Trump runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that didn’t finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.
      Trump counties include places that have voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and the strongest predictors of Trump support include how a county responded to two very different third-party candidates: Trump territory showed stronger support for the segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 election than the rest of the country, and substantially weaker support for the centrist former Republican John B. Anderson in 1980.
      Mr. Trump has performed well thus far in Appalachian coal counties and in rural parts of Alabama and Mississippi, which are coping with economic and social dysfunctions like high unemployment rates and heroin addiction. But the Times analysis also shows the common thread between those places and more urban locations where Mr. Trump has either done well or is projected to.
      In Revere, Mass., a working-class suburb of Boston, Mr. Trump won 73 percent of the Republican primary vote. The Times’s model suggests he will perform strongly on Long Island when the New York primary takes place April 19 and in Ocean County, N.J., on the Jersey Shore, on June 7.
      There were only weak correlations between Trump support and various measures of economic performance from 2007 to 2014, including the lingering damage from the 2008 global financial crisis. Rather, the economic problems that line up with strong Trump support have long been in the making, and defy simple fixes.
      The high proportion of whites without a high school diploma in these places — the single strongest predictor of Trump support of those we tested — has lasting consequences for incomes, for example. The education pay gap starts small when people are early in their career before widening over the decades of their working lives. College graduates are less likely to become unemployed and more likely to find a new job quickly if they do, and they are comparatively few in Trump-land.
      And in places where Trump does well, relatively high proportions of workers are in fields that involve working with one’s hands, especially manufacturing. The decline in manufacturing employment is not a story of merely a rough few years for the economy; nationwide factory employment peaked in 1979, and as a proportion of total jobs has been declining almost continually since 1943. Forces including mechanization and trade have put employment prospects in the sector in an ever-worsening position.
      Likewise, a better predictor of Trump outperformance than a standard-issue economic indicator like the unemployment rate is a high proportion of working-age adults who aren’t working (the correlation was strong for both men and women).
      Continue reading the main story
      To be counted as unemployed, a person must have actively looked for work in the last month. But “not working” is a broader definition that would also include, for example, people who are discouraged by what seem like grim job prospects; who are living at home tending to the house; or who are disabled and stay home while receiving government assistance.
      Nationally, 23 percent of the 25-to-54-year-old population was not working in March, up from 18 percent in 2000. The areas where Trump is most popular appear to be at the forefront of that trend.
      Despite Mr. Trump’s racially loaded message on the campaign trail, and evidence that some individual Trump voters are driven by racial hostility, this analysis didn’t show a particularly powerful relationship between the racial breakdown of a county and its likelihood of voting for Trump. There are Trump-supporting counties where very high proportions of the population are African-American and others where it was very low, for example.
      One of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants — and, as their answers on their ancestry reveal, they very much wear Americanness on their sleeve.
       

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