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.”
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).
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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