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ABSTRACT
Donald Trump’s victory depended on the defection of hundreds of longstanding Democratic communities. Trump appealed to these communities partly because he behaves like some of their most beloved politicians. Like the president, these politicians are brazen, thin skinned, nepotistic, and offer an older, boss-centered vision of politics. Trump—the anti-establishment outsider—appealed to voters in these communities because he resembles the local insiders. This appeal widens an old fault line inside the Democratic Party.
Notes
1 American history has shown that the best third parties can hope for is either to be spoilers or to adopt a fusion strategy with the party out of power.
2 Much of his support has been attributed to negative partisanship, i.e., a strong dislike of the Democratic Party (Abramowitz and McCoy Citation2019; Margolis Citation2019).
3 Evangelical Christianity often domesticates working-class men (Ault Citation2004). This tendency also helps us understand why Trump was not the preferred candidate of church-going evangelicals during the Republican primaries (Margolis Citation2019).
4 For Trump’s calculations about his class appeal, see D’Antonio Citation2015, 143-55, 192, 207; Lamont, Park, and Ayala-Hurtado Citation2017; and Keefe Citation2018.
5 There is also evidence that “racial resentment” drove Trump support, although scholars disagree about what the construct actually measures (Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck Citation2018). In our forthcoming book (Muravchik and Shields Citationforthcoming), we argue that in addition to race-based attachments, our subjects possess powerful placed-based loyalties.