Photo: MAGA rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., Nov. 14, 2020 by Elvert Barnes Photography,https://www.flickr.com/photos/perspective/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
More than seven years ago, Donald Trump celebrated his 2016 MAGA victory in the Nevada caucuses by famously declaring his love for the poorly educated. “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated,” Trump said on Feb. 23, 2016.
The New York Times described the victory as “a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters.”
“There’s just one problem: this account is wrong. Trump voters were not mostly working-class people,” wrote Nicholas Carnes, the Creed C. Black associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University and author of “The Cash Ceiling: Why Only the Rich Run for Office,” in a Washington Post analysis.
Author David Grace, who publishes government and political theory columns, looked at the Big Trump MAGA states vs. Big Biden states for education and income, among other things.
Grace found that nine of the top 11 states for percentage of college-educated people were Big Biden states while nine of the bottom 11 college-educated states were Big Trump MAGA states.
When it came to income, eight of 10 states with the lowest percentage of residents living below the poverty line were Big Biden states while nine of the 10 states with the highest percentage of residents below the poverty line were Big Trump MAGA states.
Grace found that eight of the top 10 states with the highest median incomes were Big Biden states.
“What does this tell us about the people living in the states that heavily voted for Trump? You do the math,” Grace said.
Not so fast.
The narrative attributing Trump’s victory to a “coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters” just doesn’t square with the 2016 election data, Carnes wrote.
On the contrary, many polls showed that Trump supporters were mostly affluent Republicans. A third of Trump supporters had household incomes at or below the national median of about $50,000. Another third made $50,000 to $100,000, and another third made $100,000 or more.
Regarding the assumption that Trump supporters were mostly people without college degrees, Carnes said that polling data showed about 70 percent of all Republicans didn’t have college degrees, in line with the national average of 71 percent, according to the 2013 Census.
“Far from being a magnet for the less educated, Trump seemed to have about as many people without college degrees in his camp as we would expect any successful Republican candidate to have.”
Trump did well across the board in Nevada in 2016, garnering 45.9 percent of the vote, but he did even better among voters with a high school education or less, with 57 percent of those voters supporting him, according to entrance polls, Snopes Fact Check reported.
“We won the evangelicals,” Trump said. “We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated!”
Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an interview for an April 3, 2016, PBS article, “I think it is incorrect to look at the data and conclude that those voters are more ignorant. Instead, there’s a strong correlation between having a college degree or not, and your economic situation in life.”
What was in play with Trump was the “politics of resentment,” Cramer said.
“These are folks who have been feeling a real struggle to make ends meet for decades now and they see a candidate coming along who says to them, ‘You’re right. You’re not getting your fair share. It sucks. And I’m going to stand up for you.’ That’s really appealing to people.”
Race, income, and education do not define Trump supporters, wrote Matthew MacWilliams, founder of MacWilliams Sanders, a political communications firm who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation about authoritarianism.
McWilliams conducted a national poll in late December 2015 with the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sampling 1,800 registered voters across the political spectrum, and wrote about it in Politico. He found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate.
Instead, poll responses showed that a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump: It’s authoritarianism.
“Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow,” McWilliams wrote.
