This study examined the switchers and concentrated only on two variables. They found that racial/immigration issues were important, while economic issues were really not.
However, it seems to me that the study missed the real reason. In two words: Hillary sucks. Many people who admired Obama simply did not have the same affection for Hillary. That doesn’t really have a factual basis as much as a general feeling. People simply do not like her. I’m in that same group, although I certainly don’t dislike her enough to vote for Donald Trump. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, if Donald Trump ran against Satan, I would at least give Lucifer some positive comments on Twitter.
I’m biased in favor of Hillary Clinton because she expressed neo-classical economic views and was decent at explaining them (although maybe I lacked the appreciation that non-economists didn’t understand her.)
I also thought she was hurt by a long time vicious smear job that was backed up by many in the media who have since been shown to be sexist pigs. (Mark Halperin, Matt Lauer and several other possibly relatively influential media types outside of Fox ‘News.’)
I think, obviously there are multiple causes of why these people switched from Obama to Trump but sometimes people over-complicate things and this may be one such study.
A little known phenomena in Psephology (the scientific analysis such as elections) and it disappoints me that the author of this study didn’t mention it because he must be a Psephologist, is that, of course, not all voters vote based on ideology.
There is a percentage of voter that will always vote for the incumbent, no matter which party (based on them being ‘experienced’ mainly) as there is a percentage of voters who will always vote for the opposition candidate (‘throw the bum out.’)
In this case, it may be that there is little more to the explanation than people who voted for Obama voted for Trump in order to change the party of the person in the White House. I admit this does not go all the way in that Hillary Clinton’s vote share relative to 2012 Obama’s declined most in the Midwest, however, her share of the vote relative to Obama’s did drop in 46 states. The only states where it went up are states with heavy Latino populations (Arizona, California and Texas) and Utah. Utah may seem odd at first, but Mormon Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee in 2012.
It might also make sense that these voters are the more ‘low information voters’ who may fit into the voters who switched from Obama to Trump.
Of course, it is possible that the author knows more than I do, and is aware of research that shows that as voters get sorted into more ideological camps that the percentage of people who vote the way I described above has declined.
I hated Trump. I am from NYC and Trump was always kind of a big deal in the city. But I never gave him much thought. Then Trump jumped on the birther bandwagon and I lost any and all respect I might have had for the man. When he decided to run for the GOP nomination, my biggest fear that he would run a third-party campaign when he lost the nomination. When he actually won the nomination, I felt sick and quite depressed. I didn’t see how he could beat Hillary and after 8 years of Obama I really wanted a Republican to win. Worse, I couldn’t decide if it would be worse if he pulled off a victory. As someone that cares deeply about politics, not having a candidate I could root for just deepened my depression. I voted for Gary Johnson. It was an easy protest vote being that my vote wasn’t going to make a difference in NY.
I didn’t watch any of the coverage on election day. But about 9:30 at night, I was walking from my bedroom to the bathroom and jokingly said to my brother, did Trump win yet? He said: “Not yet, but it looks like he will.” I was happy to hear that because I was really depressed by the idea of the Hillary Clinton administration to which I had resigned myself. The schadenfreude from watching the left lose it as the returns made it more and more certain he’d win was delicious. But then I thought about a President Trump and I got depressed again. But I thought at least the conservative 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court was safe.
Nearly two years in, I would say Trump hasn’t been nearly as bad as I feared. That’s not to say I think he’s doing a good job. But there have been a few pleasant surprises. I thought pulling out and trying to renegotiate NAFTA was a terrible idea. But Trump seems to have pulled it off. I think Trump really does deserve credit for the booming economy. During the Obama Administration, we recovered from the Great Recession, but we had pretty meager growth for a recovery, especially a recovery from a deep recession. Deep recessions are generally followed by steep recoveries. But the Obama Administration’s higher taxes and increased regulatory burden, in my opinion anyway, acted as a break on economic growth. Obamacare in particular made it more expensive for a business to hire a new employee and discouraged many businesses from growing above 50 full time employees because of the increased regulatory and tax burden that would follow such an expansion. Now you can argue that Obamacare was worth it. But it clearly acted as a drag on hiring. Trump took his foot off the brake and the economy soared.
I still despise Trump. But I accept that we are stuck with him for at least two more years. I will support the decisions I agree with and oppose the rest. My fantasy is that he will decide he made America Great again so he doesn’t need to run for a second term. Then Nikki Haley gets the GOP nomination, chooses Marco Rubio as her running mate and they wipe the floor with Elizabeth Warren and her running mate Bernie Sanders. In the likely event that he does run, I probably won’t vote for him. It really depends on who he is running against and perhaps whether or not I move to a swing state.
Trump didn’t do a lot with NAFTA though. Remember how all the Republicans whined about Canada not allowing in milk after like 3%? They got an additional quarter of a percent. Everything they got on that, mostly, was small time.
As for the economy I’m not totally surprised it’s doing well. Businesses like less regulation…hopefully that doesn’t take us to another 2008 where less regulation caused the crash. And all we’re doing is stimulus spending right now…that’s why the deficit which Republicans pretended to care about when Obama was around, but never did, get to spend like maniacs which they always do when they get in office. And watch, the next Democrat who gets in they’ll start screaming about the deficit and debt again.
But at least it looks like they’re going to get rid of pre-existing conditions for healthcare.
Regulatory cuts are an example of what economists call ‘time lags.’ The benefit from any regulatory cut tends to be immediate (it allows any economic activity to occur immediately or nearly immediately that had been previously ‘legally’ blocked.) However, the costs of the regulatory cuts take a while until any negative effects occur.
This is not just the case of financial regulatory cuts, but also environmental regulation cuts. Pollution from coal (any damage that hasn’t already occurred) for instance, not only hurts people’s health, but it also damages forests and ecosystems in general. So, it takes time for enough coal pollution to travel and accumulate in the atmosphere before it damages a forest that is being logged.
It is true that the economic illiterates in the national media frequently claim that cutting regulations (or cutting taxes) only benefits the economy, but, if you read the local media (especially the local weekly papers) you will frequently read businesspeople complaining of how regulatory cuts will cause harm to their own businesses.
I think the reason for this is because the national media comments on the economy as an abstraction, while the local papers comment on real local businesses and so deal with the economy in a more concrete way.
I think I’ll just say that you’re a better lawyer than you are an economist, and I’m a better economist than you are a lawyer.
There’s another theory.
The one that says the 2016 election results were hacked and the Obama-Trump voters are about as real as Bigfoot.
I 100% agree, Scoopy. I voted for Hillary Clinton, but it seemed pretty obvious that she’s not a great politician. She’s smart and capable, but she rubs lots of people the wrong way.
As a rationalist, I wish people would vote based on a sober assessment of the issues at hand and the actual voting records and so forth of the people who are running, but it’s pretty clear that in the real world, charisma matters a lot.
So true.
Hillary was also arrogant. She lost by like 100,000 votes, I think even less than that. All in places she didn’t go to. Obama may have known he’d lose a state but he still went there…so maybe he lost by 3 points instead of 5. Clinton just didn’t care.
Scoop, I would think a republican in middle America like yourself would appreciate that Trump is so committed to helping the farmers and blue collar workers. I totally get that his personality turns people off. He is unorthodox, unprofessional, exaggerates, says things he shouldn’t, and hires shady/incompetent people sometimes.
But the list of accomplishments is also undeniable. I didn’t like Trump at first, but I gladly admit I was wrong. When one side is represented by working Americans, and the other side is represented by Hollywood, news media, and Silicon Valley….I gotta side with working Americans.
brobonk, I really appreciate your evenhanded and reasonable tone here, but man, it’s so hard for me to see things the way you see them. When I see an apparently sober, non-nutty positive take on Trump, I wonder: “Am I in a liberal bubble? Is this person in a conservative bubble? Are we each in our own bubbles? Am I taking crazy pills?” Possibly all of the above. 🙂
I know for sure that Trump’s constant lying and bombast is a huge turnoff for me, such that if he happens to do something I would support under normal circumstances, I immediately assume he’s doing it for idiotic reasons, or stumbled into it accidentally, or that he’ll find a way to screw it up. That may not be fair, but it’s human.
I’m acutely aware that we all as humans engage in motivated reasoning. We cut our allies a lot of slack, and give our opponents no slack at all. If George Bush has a slip of the tongue, his allies say it’s no big deal, and his opponents say it’s evidence that he’s a moron. If Bill Clinton gets blowjobs from an intern, his allies say it’s his personal business and his opponents say it shows he’s a moral degenerate. It’s wired into our brains.
But right now, I can’t see anything that Trump has done that would be helpful to working Americans (or frankly any Americans who aren’t rich or named Trump). But I can think of things he’s advocated that will clearly hurt working Americans, most notably in his support for bills to gut the ACA. Working Americans need good health care as much as anyone, and while the ACA is far from perfect, Trump has not advocated for anything that would fix its problems. I know he *said* that he wanted coverage that would be cheaper and would cover everyone, but he hasn’t done anything to actually make that happen, as far as I can see. I’m not a single-issue voter, but it’s always seemed clear to me that the way we handle health care is seriously broken. How is health care coverage not an issue of importance to working class Americans?
In all seriousness, I’d love to know how you see things. What specifically has Trump done or said that makes you feel that he cares about working Americans? I know you didn’t say anything about Obama or Hillary Clinton, but if it’s relevant, what did they do or say that made you feel that they didn’t care about working Americans?
Very well said, Don.
What I don’t get is when people claim that Donald Trump has an “undeniable list of accomplishments”. Um, like what? Trying to take away health care? Reducing taxes on the rich? Instigating trade wars? Alienating allies? Cozying up with authoritarian regimes? Taking credit for an economic boom that he inherited from Obama?
I also don’t get why working class Americans think so much of Trump. Trump couldn’t give two shits about them, as his actions have reliably demonstrated.
They needed a *study* to figure this out? Boy, somebody’s good at writing a grant proposal. It’s like the joke –
They wanted to figure out why the head of the cock has a larger diameter than the shaft. An American study took a year, cost $750,000 and determined that it was for the man’s pleasure. A French study took 18 months, cost a million euros and concluded it was for the woman’s pleasure. The Polish study took a week, cost 75 zlotys and figured out that it was to keep you from accidentally smacking yourself in the forehead when you’re jerking off.
I voted for Stein. I would’ve voted for Bernie. Oh well.