Pathways to trump: Republican voters in 2016

The 2016 candidacy of Donald Trump has drawn considerable interest among social scientists and it invites a broader investigation into analyzing the dynamics of primary elections. We identify four key popular accounts that supposedly explained Trump's support: authoritarianism, populism, ethnic prejudice, and trade and immigration attitudes, most of which are associated with an argument about support for Trump in the white working class. With a unique survey panel to explore changing support for Republican presidential candidates over the primary season, we test these competing theories and examine their fit to the pattern of support and opposition to Trump before and after the primaries. We find that populist attitudes and anti-Muslim bias were considerably more important than authoritarian dispositions, and immigration and trade policy attitudes in explaining support for Trump among Republicans during the 2016 primary season. We demonstrate how Trump's supporters became more diverse as they increased in numbers over the primary season, but new supporters were not a representative sample of Republicans who initially supported other candidates.     

Racial attitudes & political cross-pressures in nationalized elections: The case of the Republican coalition in the Trump era

While scholars have found that Trump was able to capitalize on the racial attitudes of white voters, it is less clear how these racial attitudes influenced vote-choice across partisan and ideological cleavages in the electorate. It is also unclear whether racial attitudes affected voting at the congressional level or electoral outcomes at the aggregate level. Using a novel measure of racial attitudes at the subnational level and survey data, we make three clear findings: (1) Trump and Republican congressional candidates benefited from conservative racial attitudes both at the aggregate level and among white voters, (2) this electoral benefit for Republicans persisted during the 2018 midterm elections, and (3) the effect of attitudes on vote-choice did not significantly vary across partisan and ideological cleavages in the white electorate. Our findings suggest that, even during the era of highly nationalized and partisan elections, racial attitudes are still a mechanism by which Republicans can win significant electoral support among Democrats and relatively liberal voters in the white electorate. These findings have implications for the growing salience of race in the Republican electoral coalition.     

Adapting to party lines: the effect of party affiliation on attitudes to immigration

Public opinion on immigration is increasingly relevant for political behaviour. However, little is known about the way in which citizens’ political allegiances in turn shape their attitudes to immigration. Abundant existing evidence suggests that voters often take cues from the parties they support. Using panel data from the Netherlands and Sweden, this article investigates the dynamic relation between attitudes to immigration and party preferences. The longitudinal nature of the data allows for making stronger claims about causal mechanisms than previous cross-sectional studies. The analysis shows that voters who change their preference to the Radical Right become stricter on immigration, whereas voters changing to the Greens become less strict on immigration over time. This confirms that citizens’ support for anti- and pro-immigration parties results in a ‘radicalisation’ of their views on immigration along party lines. A similar ‘spiral’ of radicalisation can be found around the issue of European integration.     

Racial attitudes and emotional responses to the 2016 Republican candidates

ABSTRACT

We argue that both Obama ‘08 and Trump ‘16 benefited from unusually high enthusiasm generated during their respective campaigns, and these emotions conditioned underlying racial attitudes – albeit in different ways – to pave the way to the White House. Racial animosity is usually studied in the context of minority candidates, but in the 2016 election, Donald Trump (a white candidate) frequently made direct attacks on immigrants and foreigners. This study examines how emotions generated during the campaigns and racial resentment, which we consider a preexisting attitude, shaped voter evaluations of the 2016 presidential candidates in the general election and Republican primaries. Drawing on original telephone survey data from the highly salient GOP Iowa caucuses and national opinion data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we find that racial resentment interacted with positive emotions (enthusiasm) to increase support for Trump. The effect of racial attitudes in predicting favorable evaluations of Trump disappeared or diminished to a quarter of its original size when emotional responses to the candidate were measured. The study generalizes a framework about the interactive effect of existing racial attitudes and campaign-generated emotions to apply to both white and minority candidates.     

Empowering the Party-Crasher: Donald J. Trump,the First 2016 GOP Presidential Debate,and the Twitter Marketplace for Political Campaigns

This article argues that an important political marketplace of keywords expands in social media around campaign events such as a debate; that rhetorical efforts to define the situation in which a campaign event occurs are met in this marketplace by user responses that more or less echo the keywords, thereby enhancing or diminishing the political power of their “caller” or speaker; and that social media monitoring platforms can enhance our understanding of public opinion influence competitions among candidates through the careful selection, tabulation, and inspection of words and phrases being voiced. In the case at hand, an analysis of Twitter volume data and a reading of a sample of 1200 tweets between July 30 and August 15, 2015, a period enveloping the first 2016 Republican presidential candidate debate on August 6, 2015, helps us understand how Donald J. Trump escaped political punishment from party and media elites for subverting Republican and U.S. norms of candidate behavior. Elite voices greatly disapproved of Trump’s debate performance and conduct, a traditional augury of declining public support. But the presence of social media voices enhanced Trump’s capacity to succeed with an insurgent marketing strategy, one he would continue into his election as president fifteen months later. Specifically, comparatively high user volume on a debate-oriented section of Twitter (i.e., posts with the hashtag #GOPDebate) for Trump’s name, slogan, and Twitter address, and for such advantageous keywords as “political correctness,” “Megyn Kelly,” and “illegal immigration” relative to terms and phrases favoring other candidates and Republicans as a whole indicates the presence of heavy and active popular support for Trump. The contents of the corresponding tweet sample exhibit Twitter-savvy techniques and populist stances by which the Trump campaign solicited that support: celebrity feuding, callouts to legacy media allies, featured fan comments, a blunt vernacular, and confrontational branding. The contents also illustrate ways in which users manifested their support: from the aforementioned high keyword volume to imitative behavior and the supplying of evidence to verify Trump’s contested claims during the debate.     

A swing vote from the ethnic backstage: The role of German American isolationist tradition for Trump's 2016 victory

We question the growing consensus in the literature that European Americans behave as a homogenous pan-ethnic coalition of voters. Seemingly below the radar of scholarship on voting groups in American politics, we identify a group of white voters that behaves differently from others: German Americans, the largest ethnic group, regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. Using county level voting returns, ancestry group information from the American Community Survey (ACS), current survey data and historical census data going back as early as 1910, we provide evidence for a partisan and a non-partisan pathway that motivated German Americans to vote for Trump in 2016: a historically grown association with the Republican Party and an acquired taste for isolationist attitudes that mobilizes non-partisan German Americans to support isolationist candidates. Our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today.     

Authoritarian attitudes and support for radical right populists

ABSTRACT

This paper examines which parties attract support from people with authoritarian attitudes by comparing multi-party systems to a pure two-party system (the US). It proposes reasons why radical right populist (RRP) parties may serve as outlets for illiberal sentiments in multiparty systems, and offers reasons why such attitudes could correspond with support for the US Republican Party. Some have raised concerns about democratic deconsolidation in liberal democracies. There is limited evidence here consistent with deconsolidation. Politically authoritarian attitudes do exist among a small but non-trivial proportion of electorates in established democracies. In multiparty systems people with such attitudes were more likely to be supporters of smaller RRP parties that generally do not join government, but not centre-left or centre-right parties. However, US Republicans had supporters who resembled European RRP supporters in their politically authoritarian attitudes, and authoritarian attitudes were a notable predictor of support for Donald Trump in 2016.     

Jumping on the Trump Train or Ditching the Donald: Campaign Rhetoric and the 2016 Congressional Election

The 2016 general election presented an unusual challenge to Republican congressional candidates: whether to market one’s campaign as aligned with or against Donald Trump’s controversial candidacy. In this paper, we determine what district and member-level factors influence candidate endorsements of Trump for president. Second, we study if the endorsements hurt candidates on Election Day. We find that underlying political partisanship, as measured by Mitt Romney’s 2012 vote share in congressional districts, predicts much of incumbents’ support for Trump, and that candidates’ support did not harm them in the general election.     

Gendering the vote for populist radical-right parties

ABSTRACT

Why do more men than women vote for populist radical-right (PRR) parties? And do more men than women still vote for the PRR? Can attitudes regarding gender and gender equality explain these differences (if they exist)? These are the questions that Spierings and Zaslove explore in this article. They begin with an analysis of men's and women's voting patterns for PRR parties in seven countries, comparing these results with voting for mainstream (left-wing and right-wing) parties. They then examine the relationship between attitudes and votes for the populist radical right, focusing on economic redistribution, immigration, trust in the European Union, law and order, environmental protection, personal freedom and development, support for gender equality, and homosexuality. They conclude that more men than women do indeed support PRR parties, as many studies have previously demonstrated. However, the difference is often overemphasized in the literature, in part since it is examined in isolation and not compared with voting for (centre-right) mainstream parties. Moreover, the most important reasons that voters support PRR parties seem to be the same for men and for women; both vote for the populist radical right because of their opposition to immigration. In general, there are no consistent cross-country patterns regarding gender attitudes explaining differences between men and women. There are some recurring country-specific findings though. Most notably: first, among women, economic positions seem to matter less; and economically more left-wing (and those with anti-immigrant attitudes) women also vote for the PRR in Belgium, France, Norway and Switzerland; and, second, those who hold authoritarian or nativist views in combination with a strong belief that gays and lesbians should be able to ‘live their lives as they choose’ are disproportionately much more likely to vote for PRR parties in Sweden and Norway. Despite these findings, Spierings and Zaslove argue that the so-called ‘gender gap’ is often overemphasized. In other words, it appears that populist radical-right parties, with respect to sex and gender, are in many ways simply a more radical version of centre-right parties.     

‘Party competition and dual accountability in multi-level systems’ the independence echo: the rise of the constitutional question in Scottish election manifestos and voter behaviour

ABSTRACT

Since the formation of the Scottish Parliament, the idea of Scottish independence increased in salience and popularity among Scottish voters to such an extent that it now constitutes the country’s defining political cleavage. Given that Scottish politics is increasingly organized around this constitutional question, support for either side of the debate among voters and elites drives political engagement, election turnout and public attitudes to other major issues. Although much popular and academic work has sought to explain the rise of support for independence, few scholars have explored changes in elite behaviour or its consequences for public opinion. From an elite-driven perspective, the increased salience of independence may be but an echo of elite and partisan attention. Developing hypotheses from this approach, we predict that voters identifying with parties developed stronger views on independence following increased attention in parties’ campaigns. We examine these hypotheses by performing computer assisted, unsupervised content analysis of Scottish Parties’ election manifestos. We then use estimates from a structural topic model to predict change in voter support for independence from the British Election Study. The theory and results suggest that increasing salience on alternative dimensions of politics likely closely relates to elite-driven choices in their election campaigns.     

Radical right‐wing voters from right and left: Comparing Sweden Democrat voters who previously voted for the Conservative Party or the Social Democratic Party

As in many other European countries, the political system has undergone rapid changes in Sweden while a radical right‐wing party – The Sweden Democrats (SD) – has grown from a negligible position into one of the country's largest parties. SD has been winning voters from both the right and the left sides of the political spectrum, and particularly from Sweden's two largest parties, the Conservative Party (Moderaterna, M) and the Social Democratic Party (S). The present study investigated the extent to which SD voters who previously voted for one of these two parties differ from each other, and compared these SD voters with current Conservative Party and Social Democratic voters. The results showed that 1) economic deprivation offers a better explanation for the past mobility from S, than from M, to the SD; 2) no group differences were found between previous M and S voters in attitudes connected to the appeal of an anti‐establishment party; and 3) views on the profile issues espoused by the radical right, most importantly opposition to immigration, did not differ between SD voters who come from M and S. However, SD voters – particularly SD voters who had formerly voted for the Social Democratic party – differed from the voters of their previous parties in several aspects. It is thus possible that many SD voters will not return to the parties they previously voted for, at least as long as the immigration issue continues to be of high salience in the society.     

Tremors from afar: negotiating the rise of Donald Trump on Sweden’s populist right

ABSTRACT

While commentators often describe transnational far-right populism as a unified movement, Teitelbaum’s article investigates incongruities among anti-immigrant, nationalist actors in two locations today. It focuses on the implications of Donald Trump’s success for the Sweden Democrats, highlighting party leaders’ inability to establish a coherent position on the US Republican. Their struggle derives from Trump’s mismatch with the party’s emerging reformist ideals. Accordingly, the public sphere analysed in this article provides insight, not only into the internal divisions and fraught history of the Sweden Democrats, but also into the dynamic nature of contemporary right-wing populist movements in the West.     

An exploration of Donald Trump's allegations of massive voter fraud in the 2016 General Election

As Republican candidate for president and later 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly and vociferously that the 2016 General Election was tainted by massive voter fraud. Here we use aggregate election statistics to study Trump's claims and focus on non-citizen populations across the country, state-specific allegations directed at California, New Hampshire, and Virginia, and the timing of election results. Consistent with existing literature, we do not uncover any evidence supportive of Trump's assertions about systematic voter fraud in 2016. Our results imply neither that there was no fraud at all in the 2016 General Election nor that this election's administration was error-free. They do strongly suggest, however, that the expansive voter fraud concerns espoused by Donald Trump and those allied with him are not grounded in any observable features of the 2016 election.     

Donald Trump,contempt, and the 2016 GOP Iowa Caucuses

ABSTRACT

Theories of discrete emotions distinguish contempt from other negative emotions, and recent evidence shows that contempt toward candidates played a major role in two US Senate races in 2014. Contempt felt by respondents was the most significant emotion predicting voting against three of the four major party candidates, and had effects independent of other emotions, such as anger, anxiety, and hope. In the present paper, the 2016 Republican Iowa Caucus provides the opportunity to examine contempt in a different context: an intra-party primary campaign, where candidates share the important characteristic of party affiliation. We find that while voters perceived all leading GOP candidates as expressing at least some contempt, Donald Trump was seen as expressing the most contempt by far. Voters also felt contempt for at least some candidates of their own party. When they did so, it predicts significantly lowered probabilities of voting for Cruz, Trump, and Rubio, and increased probabilities of voting for one or more of their opponents. Implications of these findings for theory and research on the role of contempt and other specific emotions in voting behavior are discussed.     

Donald Trump's Hijacking of the Republican Party in Historical Perspective

Four aspects of Donald Trump's hijack of the Republican party are examined. First, how he used unconventional techniques, usually associated with some ‘reality’ television programmes, to become the leading candidate in the pre‐primary debates. He could thereby develop ‘momentum’ before the primaries began despite his limited support among Republican activists. Second, how his insurgency differed from the party's takeover in 1964 by supporters of Barry Goldwater. Third, how the Republicans have replaced the Democrats since the early 1980s as the party with a less cohesive potential coalition among voters, with the result that internal party relations became more conflictual throughout the period. Finally, that internal conflict has been intensified by two factors in those decades: the prevalence of divided government, which has made it virtually impossible to impose a truly conservative agenda on federal government policy, and the impact of forty years of stagnating real incomes for many middle‐income Americans.     

European ruling parties’ electoral strategies and overseas enfranchisement policies

Emigrants’ ideologies and partisan attitudes may diverge from other voters’: overseas voters are ideologically self-selected, receive distinctive information about campaigns and have experiences abroad that are likely to shape their political views. Parties, anticipating these emigrant attitudes, can manipulate overseas voting availability to give the vote primarily to their own supporters. Alternatively, parties may expect newly enfranchised voters to provide electoral support in gratitude for the right to vote. To distinguish these separate processes, this project undertakes a case study of Turkey to trace a ruling party's strategic expectations as it makes overseas-enfranchisement decisions. To see how generalisable these results are, the study further extends to a statistical analysis of differences in vote choice between voters at home and abroad across all 23 European countries that report overseas votes separately, using an original dataset encompassing 121 elections. Both the case study and the statistical analysis suggest that emigrant-enfranchising parties tend to garner overseas voters’ support in a lasting way. This suggests that overseas enfranchisement most often appears to involve incumbent parties (correctly) expecting long-term ideological compatibility with their overseas nationals, not simply exchanging the franchise for short-term, transactional support.     

The distorting effects of racial animus on proximity voting in the 2016 elections

While the use of racial appeals by the 2016 Trump campaign is indisputable, researchers are actively debating their precise role in influencing voter behavior in the election. We seek to expand upon existing research which finds that racial animus electorally benefited the Trump campaign. We examine to what extent those benefits also materialized for GOP candidates down-ballot and whether racial animus distorted ideological proximity voting in the 2016 election. We find that racial animus among voters helped Republicans at multiple ballot levels and that higher levels of racial animus distorted spatial voting among voters ideologically closest to the Democratic candidate.     

How has Radical Right Support Transformed Established Political Conflicts? The Case of Austria

In many European party systems, the radical right has challenged established patterns of political competition. This article studies the consequences of this by using the case of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and data from Austria’s first national election study (AUTNES). It is found that the FPÖ has weakened Austria’s previously highly stable system of socio-structural and ideological divisions as expressed by the two mainstream parties, the People’s Party and the Social Democrats. In socio-structural terms, the FPÖ has undermined the Social Democrats’ support base. In ideological terms, FPÖ voters have distinct views on newer issues such as immigration, European integration and dissatisfaction with the political system, but its supporters’ views on Austria’s traditional conflicts surrounding the economy and social and religious values cannot explain the party’s success. These findings further our understanding of the transformation of political conflicts not just in Austria, but in Western Europe in general.     

Donald Trump and right-wing populists in comparative perspective

ABSTRACT

We compare sources of Donald Trump’s appeal in the 2016 US presidential campaign to the appeal of right-populists from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. We compare the appeal of right-populist to center-right candidates in each case (as measured with feeling thermometers) and test hypotheses about how the appeal of right-populists differs from that of center-right candidates. Standard predictors of affect toward right-of-center candidates were generally less relevant as a basis of affect toward right-populist candidates. This comparative perspective demonstrates that Trump’s appeal was based on racial resentment, anti-immigration sentiments and anxiety. Affect toward Trump and other right-populists from these Anglo-democracies fits patterns previously observed in Europe, a pattern that appears to be world-wide.     

Red Europe versus no Europe? The impact of attitudes towards the EU and the economic crisis on radical-left voting

The 2014 European Parliament election saw a relatively large increase in the size of radical-left parties (RLPs), particularly in Western Europe. This article aims to provide new ways of thinking about the dynamics of radical-left voting by analysing the changing role of attitudes towards the European Union in explaining support for RLPs at European Parliament elections during the Great Recession. It is argued that the Europeanisation of economic issues during the financial crisis, together with the particular kind of Euroscepticism advocated by these parties, have enabled them to successfully attract a heterogeneous pool of voters. Using the 2009 and 2014 European Election Studies, it is shown that the effect of negative opinions about the EU on support for RLPs increased significantly during the crisis. In addition, support for RLPs also increased among voters with positive views of the EU who were nevertheless highly dissatisfied with the economic situation.