Introduction

Donald J. Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 presidential election was profoundly unsettling to American politics. Trump had never run for, let alone held, public office of any kind. He was more than an outsider to conventional politics: his lack of political experience was perhaps the least disruptive feature of his candidacy. Trump ran a profoundly divisive campaign, impugning past political leaders and his opponents. He built his candidacy off a five-year campaign to prove that his predecessor, the first nonwhite president, Barack Obama held office illegitimately because he allegedly was not born in the US. The birther lie that Trump championed was, however, but a harbinger of the racially inflammatory campaign he would run, the divisive candidate he would prove to be, and the problematic president he became. His inexperience and his racial provocations were just part of his uniqueness. There was also Trump’s unprecedented level of lying. Trump lied incessantly about things large and small, refusing to take back his most outrageous lies about millions of illegal immigrants voting for his opponent Hillary Clinton, President Obama tapping his phones, and sundry other conspiracy theories, smears, and lies, even as he refused to address the mounting evidence he and his campaign colluded with Vladimir Putin and the Russians. Even when it came to the routine matters of governing, Trump proved, again and again, he was distinctively unqualified. He consistently demonstrated he was lazy and uninformed, refusing to study and learn the basic facts of his own policy proposals, making it possible upon reflection to think that some of his lies were the result of his sheer ignorance the issues he discussed. Yet Trump was not just inexperienced, insincere, and ignorant, he was also intemperate. Trump’s highly bombastic diatribes were most vicious when directed against out-groups who he incessantly lied about, whether it was Mexican immigrants, Muslim refugees, African American citizens, liberals, women, and many others. While Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million, Trump won the Electoral College by flipping three pivotal rust-belt states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where turnout for Clinton was depressed and Trump mobilized disaffected groups to vote for him. But how could people vote for such an outrageous candidate? And what does that say about US politics today? This symposium includes three research papers from a faculty seminar at Hunter College that spent the year studying this topic. It is but a beginning of ongoing research, but the initial research is itself eye-opening.

All three papers in this symposium rely on data from the 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Study (ANES), which was conducted by researchers at Stanford University in late January, 2016.¹ The sample consists of 1,200 adults who were chosen in a manner that provided a nationally representative sample based on age, race, gender, and education. This survey provides an early snapshot of Trump supporters and allows us to look inside his coalition as it was in formation.

The first article in the symposium is Remove by Michael Lee’s “Multiple Baskets: Diverse Racial Frames and the 2016 Republican Primary.” It contrasts Trump support to other Republican Party candidates. The article notes that Trump bested his opponents handily, but many voters supporting Trump in the 2016 election may have done so reluctantly and with serious reservations. In the exit polls following the election, sixty percent of voters indicated that they had an “unfavorable” view of Trump.² For instance, while evangelical conservatives may have voted for Trump to ensure the appointment of conservative Supreme Court justices, others perhaps acted out of partisan loyalty to the Republican Party. The article works off the premise that it is important to understand not only those voters that supported Trump enthusiastically but also those that voted for Trump reluctantly.

The article considers four broad arguments about what drove Trump’s success in the 2016 primary. Some accounts argue that Trump was able to appeal to economically anxious “battlers”—voters struggling from the impact of the 2008 financial crisis. Others highlight the role of race in American politics; different interpretations might be possible. Perhaps Donald Trump’s base resembles other Republicans, who employed a “southern strategy” to assemble a coalition of free market conservatives and voters with racial resentment towards African Americans. If true, Trump may not differ so much from other Republicans. Alternatively, Trumpism might represent a new kind of racial politics. Some works argue that voters do not start out with racial animus, but rather, strong attachment to in-groups. During times where they perceive serious external threats, such voters may lash out at outgroups.

Based on the ANES Pilot Study, the article argues that Trump won by appealing to new groups of racially anxious and resentful individuals. Nonetheless, contrary to other recent research, this article’s analysis does not find evidence that Trump support relied on strong attachments to white or American identity.³ Instead, Lee argues that Trump was able to appeal to a diverse coalition of voters with different kinds of racial anxieties. Although most Republican candidates attracted favorable views among voters with resentful attitudes toward African Americans, Trump also drew admiration from a second, overlapping group of xenophobes, worried about Muslims, growing Hispanic populations, and the implications of demographic change for their political power. Lee contends that the prominent presidential campaigns of two Hispanic-Americans (Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio), Republican efforts to appeal to minority voters following their 2012 defeat, and the rhetoric of Donald Trump may have heightened the fears of this second group of voters. Trumpism (ca. January, 2016 when the ANES pilot was conducted) came to be a quilt, stitching together individuals with distinct concerns. However, it is possible that the general election campaign, coalescence around common media organs like Breitbart, and the challenges of governance may yet fuse the constituent parts of Trump’s electoral coalition into a cohesive white nationalist voting bloc.

The second article is by Charles Tien and it focuses on the critical, if underdiscussed, role of the female vote in Trump’s victory. Hillary Clinton centered her campaign on the fact that if she won she would be the first female president. She risked losing other constituencies with a strong emphasis on getting women to turn out for her in large numbers. In the end, while she did win the female vote, fifty-two percent of white women who cast ballots voted for Trump. Tien finds that many white women were like white men in supporting Trump for a variety of reasons stemming from Republican Party affiliation, conservative ideology, religious reasons, and economic concerns. But race loomed large for white women as much as it did for men. Trump’s appeals to racial resentments were effective in attracting support among white women enough to contribute to a majority of white female voters turning away from Clinton to support Trump.

The final article in the symposium is by Richard C. Fording and myself. It is titled “The Cognitive and Emotional Sources of Trump Support: The Case of Low-Information Voters.” This article provides empirical evidence from the ANES Pilot for the hypothesis that Donald Trump distinctively attracted unprecedented levels of support from “low-information voters.” The findings suggest that his campaign exploited a void of facts and reasoning among these voters that made them more vulnerable to relying on emotions, fear, anxiety, hate, and rage, about Mexican immigrants, Muslims refugees, African American citizens and their disdain for the first African American president Barack Obama. Given informational and cognitive deficits regarding politics, these voters were more vulnerable to responding to emotional appeals that exploited their fears and anxieties regarding these groups. As a result, these particular Trump supporters were less in a position to want or be able to question Trump’s seemingly unprecedented campaign of misstatements, untruths, and lies. While the Trump coalition had diverse elements, and some people may have voted for him knowing full well and not caring that his statements were disconnected from the truth, others may have been taken in by his lies, smears and conspiracy theories because they lacked the cognitive and emotional bases to resist his inflammatory appeals. The article discusses what these findings say about the Trump coalition overall, Trumpian style campaigning, and the implications for US politics more generally in the Trump era.

These three articles are but the beginning of what is likely to be an avalanche of scholarly research on the Trump coalition and its role in helping bring about Trump’s shocking victory. These initial analyses center around how Trump attracted voters based on racist appeals. The findings are all in agreement that race was a key factor in helping create the Trump coalition. This puts these papers at odds with other initial research that gives more stress to class concerns stemming from the inequitable consequences of the ongoing neo-liberalization of the US political economy.⁴ That debate over class concerns versus racial resentments as the more critical factor in helping mobilize the Trump coalition will continue.⁵ Yet, the analyses also open the door to debate about how race was critical in helping form the Trump coalition. Whether the Trump supporters were already racist or were just vulnerable to having pre-existing racial anxieties exploited is just one of the issues that arise in comparing these three articles. Other debates are likely to arise with further research.⁶ This symposium is designed to help further that debate in the hopes that a robust understanding of how Trump won the presidency can help counter the deleterious politics he has inflicted on the US political system.

This symposium is most appropriate for inclusion in this special issue celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the Caucus for a New Political Science. From its inception, the Caucus has always emphasized a more political Political Science.⁷ The three articles in this symposium are consistent with that call. Each offers an analysis that is mainstream Political Science with a twist: they frame quantitative analyses in a politically engaged way. They combine objective statistical analysis with normative critique of the Trump coalition. In this way, the symposium provides a model of how the politically- engaged Political Science long championed by the Caucus for a New Political Science is today being integrated into mainstream Political Science.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sanford F. Schram is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, CUNY. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Hunter College Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute and a member of the Sociology faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center where he teaches in Political Science. In 2012, he received the Charles McCoy Career Achievement Award from the Caucus for a New Political Science.

Notes

¹ 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Study (ANES), available online at: http://www.electionstudies.org/studypages/anes_pilot_2016/anes_pilot_2016.htm.

² CNN. “Exit Polls,” CNN, (2016), available online at: http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls.

³ See Thomas B. Edsall, “Donald Trump’s Identity Politics,” New York Times, (August 24, 2017), available online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/opinion/donald-trump-identity-politics.html?mcubz=3.

⁴ Jeff Guo, “Stop Blaming Racism for Donald Trump’s Rise,” The Washington Post, (August 19, 2016), available online at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/19/stop-blaming-racism-for-donald-trumps-rise/.

⁵ For an initial examination of this question, see Philip Klinkner, “The Easiest Way to Guess if Someone Supports Trump? Ask if Obama is a Muslim,” Vox, (June 2, 2016), available online at: http://www.vox.com/2016/6/2/11833548/donald-trump-support-race-religion-economy.

⁶ For an argument that race and class are always entwined in American politics including the Trump election, see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Keynote Address, Caucus for a New Political Science, San Francisco, CA, September 2, 2017.

⁷ Sanford F. Schram, Bent Flyvbjerg and Todd Landman, “Political Science: A Phronetic Approach,” New Political Science 35:3 (2013), pp. 359–372.