Vote Switching in the 2016 Election: How Racial and Immigration Attitudes, Not Economics, Explain Shifts in White Voting

Abstract

In the aftermath of Donald Trump's 2016 electoral college victory, journalists focused heavily on the white working class (WWC) and the relationship between economic anxiety, racial attitudes, immigration attitudes, and support for Trump. One hypothesized but untested proposition for Donald Trump's success is that his unorthodox candidacy, particularly his rhetoric surrounding economic marginalization and immigration, shifted WWC voters who did not vote Republican in 2012 into his coalition. Using a large national survey we examine 1) whether racial and immigration attitudes or economic dislocation and marginality were the main correlates of vote switching, and; 2) whether this phenomenon was isolated among the white working class. We find a non-trivial number of white voters switched their votes in the 2016 election to Trump or Clinton, that this vote switching was more associated with racial and immigration attitudes than economic factors, and that the phenomena occurred among both working class and non-workingclass whites, though many more working-class whites switched than non-working class whites. Our findings suggest that racial and immigration attitudes may be continuing to sort white voters into new partisan camps and further polarize the parties.

“No, You're Playing the Race Card”: Testing the Effects of Anti‐Black, Anti‐Latino, and Anti‐Immigrant Appeals in the Post‐Obama Era

“…First, the political salience of other racial and ethnic minority groups, especially Latinos, has been increasing (Abrajano & Hajnal, ; Collingwood, Barreto, & Garcia‐Rios, ). Indeed, the growth and dispersion of the Latino population have been shown to trigger feelings of racial and cultural threat among whites (Craig, Rucker, & Richeson, ; Enos, ; Hopkins, ; Newman, ; Ostfeld, ), increase conservative sentiment and Republican Party support (Craig & Richeson, 2014; Newman, Shah, & Collingwood, ; Reny, Collingwood, & Valenzuela, ), expand support for punitive anti‐immigrant policy (Abrajano & Hajnal, ), and bolster anti‐immigrant policy entrepreneurs at the state and local levels (Gulasekaram & Ramakrishnan, ). While politicians continue to capitalize on anti‐Latino sentiment for electoral gain, little is known about the persuasive effects of implicit and explicit appeals aimed at denigrating Latinos (although see Hopkins & Ostfeld, ).…”

Reducing Exclusionary Attitudes Through Interpersonal Conversation: Evidence from Three Field Experiments

“…Exclusionary attitudes-prejudice towards outgroups and opposition to policies that promote their well-being (Enos 2014)-have been implicated in political and social strife worldwide, including populist voting in the United States (Sides, Tesler and Vavreck 2018;Reny, Collingwood and Valenzuela 2019) and the resurgence of far-right political parties in Europe (Dinas et al 2019;Hangartner et al 2019). Unfortunately, previous research has found that intergroup prejudices and corresponding exclusionary political attitudes typically are strong (Hopkins, Sides and Citrin 2019;Tesler 2015), arise in the presence of even minimal group differences (Tajfel 1970), persist over time (Lai et al 2016), and are likely to further grow in response to demographic change (Velez 2018; Hajnal and Rivera 2014; Hopkins 2010; Sands and de Kadt 2019; Craig and Richeson 2014).…”

The Shadow of the Pithead: Understanding Social and Political Attitudes in Former Coal Mining Communities in the UK

“…Renno (2018) further argues the Bolsonaro voter is more likely economically illiberal, and culturally and socially reactionary. In the case of a vote for Trump 2016, racial attitudes and hard-line positions on the threat of immigration -rather than experience of its actual impacts -were important explanators (Reny et al, 2019;Whiteley et al 2020). An especially interesting paper by Fabian et al (2020) argues that notions of (community) identity are key to understanding the switch to Trump in the rust belt.…”