The New York Times recently reignited the debate on whether Trump’s base was motivated by something called ‘economic anxiety’ or something else. This something else is variably ‘racial anxiety,’ ‘status anxiety,’ or some other anxiety based on an identity term or sociological term.
The NYT cites status anxiety in the article linked above, while 538 argues for economic anxiety. Different conclusions, same framework.
I think the quick story here is that the social science research underlying these conclusions flows from many nice, tidy distinctions that can be studied empirically. These distinctions facilitate research, but may not map particularly well onto the actual world.
I’m looking at three questions in this post: Who in the world would do something as vile as vote for Trump, or, alternatively, who is most important to Trump’s base? Why would they do such a thing? And how does ‘economic anxiety’, or other forms of anxiety, fit into this picture?
I think we can approach these questions from a few angles.
Framing
First is the set of frames we use when talking about Trump’s base.
Invariably, people who talk about Trump’s base structure the discussion around some group of people called the ‘white working class.’
One side says that the ‘white working class’ is beset by economic anxiety. They’re frustrated that the Democratic Party, their former champion, no longer pays attention to them and their interests. They lash out in response by voting for Trump.
The other side says…something a bit less clear. The basic story seems to be that many members of the ‘white working class’ suffer from a kind of primordial racism. They lashed out at the nation’s first black president by voting for his polar opposite, which is supposed to be represented by Trump.
You might be wondering why I’m putting the term ‘white working class’ in quotes.
You might also be getting the idea that I think both the sides I just outlined are largely bullshit.
Alas, these are the quotes of skepticism. It’s not really clear to me what the term ‘white working class’ picks out, first and foremost for reasons of how to define ‘class‘ in the first place. It’s not clear whether particular classes have strong enough racial divisions to sensibly talk about racially-oriented sub-classes. And the best evidence we have indicates the Trump’s base isn’t working class, anyway.
Anatomy of a Trump Supporter
We aren’t exactly lacking data on who voted for Trump. Exit polls were all over this.
Here’s what they show. Trump voters tend to have these features: (a) white; (b) male; (c) non-college graduate; (d) rural; (e) older; (f) earn middle (i.e., $50,000-$100,000) or higher (i.e., greater than $100,000) income; and, especially (g) the intersection of two or more of (a) – (f).
That’s a generalization, and there are exceptions. For example, many white women also voted Trump. It’s just that men were relatively more likely to do so. Likewise, many rural and non-college graduates voted for Clinton. Just not as many as voted for Trump.
From the data, we can draw a composite sketch of three groups of people who make up most Trump supporters. The three groups also make up practically all of Trump’s base:
1: Middle income whites who earn $50,000-$100,000, generally don’t have a college degree, and generally live in rural areas
2: Upper middle income whites who earn $100,000-$250,000, generally don’t have a college degree, and may live in rural or suburban (but probably not urban) areas
3: Rich whites who earn more than $250,000, may or may not have a college degree, and live in all areas
Let me ask you: do you know anyone in Groups 1-3? How many of them would you consider to be working class? If you’re like me, the two answers are ‘yes, lots of people’ and ‘practically none.’
Anatomy of the ‘White Working Class’
I don’t like to insult the reader. You can probably see where this is going. Do you have a Venn diagram ready?
The three groups above don’t seem very working class, on most definitions of ‘working class’ that people would use in their daily lives. I also think some of the ordinary usages of ‘working class’ probably track objective features of the class system better than social scientific methods track them. I’m also enough of a reader of J. L. Austin to be pleased by that result.
So we have to be creative. To define ‘working class’ in relation to the class system, I’ll suggest the following mouthful of a definition of ‘working class adult’: a person 18 or older who isn’t purposely out of the labor force (e.g., full-time students who don’t work are excluded, stay-at-home parents who aren’t looking for work are excluded), and who works (or is seeking work, or doesn’t work but is married to someone who works, or is retired from working) for a company in a rank-and-file/front-line, non-managerial job. To turn this into ‘white working class,’ we just replace ‘a person 18 or older’ in the above definition with ‘a white person 18 or older’.
So, who do these people vote for? We don’t precisely know. The exit polls don’t ask the right questions.
But for my purposes here, it turns out not to be especially critical who they vote for. Maybe most of the working class whites who voted cast their ballots for Trump. The point is that this group made up a very small percentage of voters in the first place.
For practical purposes, I’ll assume that people who work and earn less than $50,000 per year count as ‘rank-and-file/front-line, non-managerial.’ It’s not a perfect assumption. Some managers earn less than $50,000, and some people who earn more than $50,000 are rank-and-file.
But I think it’s the best assumption we can make with our current data. There’s a genuine qualitative break at about $50,000. People who earn more than $50,000 in most of the United States have a lifestyle that’s different from the one you can afford as a $10-15/hr worker or even a worker at the median individual income of about $32,000. They’re earning a living wage and probably have moved into some kind of non-front-line role. They’re much more likely to own a good home, have a good retirement plan, etc.
With that assumption in place, we see from the exit poll data that only 36% of voters earn less than $50,000 per year. Most (about 53%) voted for Clinton. Some aren’t white. A few are full-time college students without jobs. Some are retired from non-working class jobs.
Once you get finished winnowing this group down to the ‘white working class,’ you find that the white working class vote isn’t very large. Even if this vote went overwhelmingly for Trump, the group simply isn’t large enough to make up much of his base. And we don’t even know whether or not this vote did go overwhelmingly for Trump. This is why the ‘white working class’ isn’t listed in Groups 1-3 above. It’s not a large segment of Trump’s vote.
Explanation
So, what went wrong here? Why do so many political analysts keep claiming, falsely, that the ‘white working class’ is Trump’s base and that they voted for Trump because they suffer from some form of anxiety?
Much of it’s because they define ‘working class’ badly, and get bad results from a bad definition.
When it’s time to spill some ink, I think analysts have something like Group 1 above in mind by ‘white working class.’ But in relation to the broader class system, this mostly isn’t a working class group.
The analysts generally use an SES approach to class when they sit down to write about these things. They use definitions that stress SES categories like education, defining ‘white working class’ as, for example, ‘whites without a college degree.’
If you’re like me, and you grew up white in a very white rural area where hardly anyone had a college degree, it’s not hard to see the problem. Whites without a college degree don’t have a lot in common, and they certainly don’t constitute a common class. Within the vast sea of non-college-degreed whiteness, there are people living in luxury homes and people living in hovels.
Some are working class, and some aren’t.
If you put all these people in a box, label the box ‘working class’, and draw conclusions, your conclusions will be off. Garbage.
When you open the box, you’ll find people who are working class and people who aren’t. The ones who aren’t working class mostly voted, and mostly voted for Trump. The ones who are working class mostly didn’t vote at all. No political party represents the interests of the working class people in this group, and so they don’t vote.
Framing (redux)
So what about this anxiety stuff?
The ‘debate’ between the NYT and 538 is based on a bad framing of the problem. It’s poorly motivated. It sets up a false dilemma.
The group who supposedly suffers from these anxieties and supposedly voted for Trump didn’t vote in large enough numbers to turn any election. They weren’t Trump’s base.
The false dilemma enters the picture for a couple of reasons. One, people can suffer from both economic anxiety and status/racial/other anxiety simultaneously. But the research can likely account for this. Social scientists aren’t usually that bad.
The second and more important reason is that the research says little about what causes the various anxieties. Status and/or racial anxiety is not inherent, biologically based, or in any other way primordial. It comes from somewhere. It’s an open question as to what causes it, and economic anxiety (or something else referencing economic or class status) is a plausible candidate for the cause.
I’ve written previously against conflating what is foundational and what is important. Status or racial anxiety is very unlikely to be foundational, but it’s often important. It remains an open question as to what it rests on, because research is really aimed only at identifying surface anxieties. It’s not getting at the causes of those anxieties.
Conclusions on Economic Anxiety and Other Anxieties
If I’m right, I think the following lessons apply:
1. The ‘white working class’ isn’t Trump’s base.
2. Members of the working class, whether white or non-white, are relatively unlikely to vote in the current political environment.
3. Trump’s most critical base is white middle and upper middle income/wealth people without college degrees.
4. Trump’s voters may have been driven by economic anxiety, racial anxiety, or both, or neither.
5. The underlying causes of any non-economic anxiety may themselves be economic.
Image Source: Gage Skidmore
