Subtitle:  And economic populism might not win them back.
Incredibly timely/useful article just came out (given the debates on the forum we've been having the past few months) and finally we seem to have hard evidence on what was driving people's decisions during this election. And as it turns out, it wasn't economics.
https://www.thenation.com/article/fear-of-diversity-made-people-more-likely-to-vote-trump/
Incredibly timely/useful article just came out (given the debates on the forum we've been having the past few months) and finally we seem to have hard evidence on what was driving people's decisions during this election. And as it turns out, it wasn't economics.
https://www.thenation.com/article/fear-of-diversity-made-people-more-likely-to-vote-trump/
Trump was different than previous GOP candidates.
The Obama Defectors Research suggests, for instance, that reminding whites who have high levels of ethnic identification about rising diversity leads them to view Trump more favorably. (This finding is supported by other similar research.) We find evidence for the idea that rising diversity helped fuel Trumps rise in the Cooperative Congressional Analysis Project data set, a survey that interviewed respondents during both the 2012 and 2016 elections (a panel survey). Because the survey includes data on multiple elections, we can compare how views have shifted support for political candidates.
For our analysis, we explored four questions about how rising diversity would impact the nation. We combined these variables into a single measure, with 0 meaning most likely to believe that demographic change will have positive consequences and 1 indicating views that diversity will have negative consequences. As displayed in the chart below, opinions about increasing racial diversity vary across racial groups, partisan lines, and education levels. The average score on the diversity scale is .44, indicating that Americans lean towards being more optimistic about rising diversity. However, the average white person views increasing racial diversity more negatively than the average person of color in America. Whites were less optimistic about diversity, with a mean score of .47, compared to .34 for African Americans, .40 among Latinos, and .37 among Asians. Republicans and those with a high-school diploma or less exhibit the highest amount of negativity towards increasing racial diversity in America.
To test how views on diversity affected voting during the 2016 election, we created a model that controls for age, race, education, income, gender, party identification, concern about rising immigration, racial resentment, and worries about personal finances. In order to provide some historical context for how Trump reshaped the electorate, we also modeled voting for Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008.
The results, displayed in the chart below, show that probability of support for Trump increases sharply with negative views on rising diversity, and positive views towards diversity decrease the probability of voting for Trump. Interestingly, these attitudes have no significant effect on probability of voting for Romney or McCain.
 The Decline Of Class Our analysis also shows that seeing racial diversity as a threat also helps to explain what motivated those voters who switched from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to voting for Trump in 2016.
The CCAP data indicate that 9 percent of Obama 2012 voters switched to Trump in 2016, and about 5 percent of Romney 2012 voters defected from Trump by voting for Hillary Clinton, and 6 percent voted for another candidate. Perceiving growing racial diversity as a threat strongly predicts Obama to Trump vote switchers, and more positive attitudes towards diversity predict the probability that a Romney 2012 voter would defect from the Republican nominee in 2016. The chart below shows that among whites most accepting of diversity there was a predicted 33 percent chance of defecting, compared to a 2 percent chance for whites with the most negative views about rising diversity. Among whites with the most positive views of rising diversity, the model predicts a less than 2 percent chance of an Obama voters voting for Trump. This compares to a 50 percent chance of voting for Trump among whites with the most negative views of rising diversity. Moreover, our analysis indicates that these attitudes had a stronger effect on vote switchers than any other variable, including racial resentment and attitudes towards immigration.
 Additional analysis reveals differences between white Republican and Democratic identifiers who switched from Obama to Trump. Seeing diversity as a threat had a particularly strong effect on white Republican identifiers who switched from Obama to Trump, but a comparatively modest effect on white Democratic switchers. Similarly, racial resentment towards blacks had a stronger impact on the probability of Obama-to-Trump vote switching for white Republicans compared to white Democrats.
Conclusion
