The five Trump voters

Who are Trump voters? Yes, okay, I know, we've seen this question beaten into the ground since the Republican primary season began ramping up in early 2016, especially by folks who can't fathom that anyone would vote for Donald Trump.  But courtesy of Henry Olsen, I ran across some public opinion research, published last year, that tries to sketch out just who it is who pulled the lever for Trump - and why.

I've offered my amateur opinion here, more than once, that Trump's electoral victory represents a coalition between two groups: traditional Republicans and the Trump Party.  According to my theory, the latter are voters who probably don't adhere very much to traditional Republican doctrine, but whom Trump induced to cross over from the other side, or coaxed out of the La Z Boy, to vote for him.

The research I'll be looking at in this post, by Emily Ekins of the Voter Study Group, offers a deeper dive, and a corrective, to my rather superficial theory.  Utilizing data collected from some 8,000 surveys taken in December 2016 by The Democracy Fund VOTER Survey (VOTER is an acronym for Views Of The Electorate Research), Ekins discerns five distinct profiles of voters who voted for Trump a month earlier (the percentage of Trump's overall vote total are in parentheses):

• American Preservationists (20%) - This is the group that probably most resembles the liberal gloss/caricature of Trump voters as racially motivated.  Ekins uses the adjective "nativist" to describe their leanings on immigration and white identity, and she describes this group as the "core" of his voters - this is Trump's true base.  But Preservationists, who have less education and lower income levels than most of the other groups, also lean more progressive than most other Trump voters on economic and government entitlement issues.  And many of them are open to voting for Democrats.
  
• Anti-Elites (19%) - This is the youngest (by a little bit) group of Trump voters.  They share some of young people's disenchantment with the economy and politics, believing that the former is tilted against them and the latter is unresponsive to them and their needs.  They also seem to be the most progressive of Trump's voters.  This is the group of voters about whom it occasionally has been noted that Trump voters resemble Bernie Sanders voters.   But this group's attitude toward Hillary Clinton, which had been relatively positive in 2012, had nearly crashed through the floor by 2016.
  
• Staunch Conservatives (31%) - These are the "values voters" who tend to vote Republican because of moral issues, but who also share conservative values of fiscal responsibility and limited government.  They are also skeptical about immigration.  I would think that the Southern Baptist Trump voters profiled in Jean's recent post are mostly Staunch Conservatives.
  
• Free Marketeers (25%) - These are the voters who are motivated primarily by fiscal responsibility and freedom from excessive government regulation and control.  They tend to be more tolerant and positive toward immigrants and gays than voters in the other groups.  For what it's worth, this is the group where I most likely would have landed - had I been a Trump voter.  But I couldn't bring myself to vote for him, and I don't fit perfectly into this group (and a good deal less perfectly in all the others).
  
• The Disengaged (5%) - These seem to be the so-called "low information" voters.  They do not follow politics or current events very closely, and do not profess to have strong opinions on a variety of contemporary issues. Compared to most other Trump voters, they are younger and skew more female.  They remind me of my own sisters when my siblings and I were young adults - they voted for whomever my dad told them to, when they could be bothered to vote at all.  But immigration and the temporary Muslim ban seem to have struck a chord with them.  Like the Anti-Elites, they feel powerless about politics and the economy and believe those institutions are stacked against them.

There is much, much more about each group in Ekins' report - please do read it if you are interested.

As I read the report, I found it somewhat difficult to keep track of which groups held which views about which issues.  So I created a summary chart, which I've pasted below.  Here is how to read it:

• Across the top are the five profiles identified by Ekins
• Listed down the left side are some (but not all) of the issues surveyed by the VOTER survey.
• For each issue, I've tried to classify each group's leaning with a color, as follows:
• Red means that the group leans traditionally Republican
• Blue means that the group leans more toward liberal/progressive views.  After compiling the chart and looking it over, I was surprised to see how many blue rectangles there are.  That may indicate that there is more convergence or even consensus on contemporary issues than is generally acknowledged in our public discourse.  Those blue rectangles may also indicate issues for which conservative thought and rhetoric is misaligned with Republican voters - and those may be areas that Democrats can exploit.
• Purple means that the group is mixed, with neither conservative nor liberal views predominating
• A few rectangles are white with "DK" in them - that means that, for the issue under consideration, a majority or the largest plurality of that group answered "Don't Know".  The Disengaged group had a sprinkling of these.  Ekins notes in her report that the response may indicate that The Disengaged respondents truly don't know, or it may indicate that they simply don't wish to share their views on the survey.
• For one issue, Free Trade, I've listed the view more supportive of free trade as blue/progressive, and the less supportive view as red/conservative.  That probably is the opposite of how the two sides traditionally have viewed free trade and tariffs, but Trump seems to have flipped the issue, with his followers (mostly) staying loyal to his protectionist agenda, and some liberal opinion makers now extolling the benefits of free trade - perhaps at least partly in reaction to Trump.  Whether the liberal rank and file has adopted a free trade stance, I don't know; for most of my lifetime, free trade and globalism have been anathema to unions

Here is the chart, which I've had to break into two sections in order to import:

A few thoughts and conclusions from the report:

Trump's voters are not monolithic.  It's somewhat difficult to make sweeping claims about Trump voters, because they really do vary across a variety of issues and demographic characteristics.  They differ widely on issues such as climate change and the importance of racial identity.  And even the color chart above hides differences in intensity from one group to another.  Thus, there is broad concern about discrimination against Whites, but it's considerably more important to American Preservationists than it is to Free Marketeers.

 Henry Olsen believes that Trump's surprising resilience as president is due to his figuring out how to give each of these groups what they want.  The tax cut probably is particularly important to Free Marketeers; Gorsuch's and Kavanaugh's nominations to the Supreme Court are particularly important to Staunch Conservatives; the temporary Muslim ban is particularly important to American Preservationists; trade wars are particularly important to Anti-Elites.

There are Democratic opportunities among Trump voters.  Three columns, the American Preservationists, the Anti-Elites and The Disengaged, have quite a bit of blue and purple in them.  Each of these seem to be moderate voters whom Trump induced to vote for him.  It's an open question whether Democrats would welcome the largest of those groups, the American Preservationists (cf. Hillary Clinton's famous "basket of deplorables" statement).  But the fact remains that that group should be open to Democratic messaging on the economy and health care.  The Anti-Elites are nearly as large a group as the American Preservationists, and in my view they would be the most promising group for Democrats to pursue.  They would seem to be the most in-tune to the direction that the Democratic Party seems to be moving, in a more liberal and populist direction.  The Disengaged are a bit of an enigma, but it's noteworthy that it's the only one of the five groups that would have been supportive of Bernie Sanders.  And Trump's electoral victory was extremely narrow; Democrats don't need to coax many Trump voters back into their column.

Hillary Clinton was the wrong Democratic Party candidate for 2016.  Whatever we may think of Donald Trump the President or Donald Trump the person, he and his campaign deserve credit for figuring out how to thread the needle between and through these diverse groups to stitch together a coalition that got him beyond 270 electoral votes in 2016.  Among the most striking findings of Ekins' research is how poorly Clinton fared with these groups in 2016, especially in comparison with Trump voters' considerably more positive attitudes toward her in 2012. Her stock dropped sharply with three of the five groups, and none of the five groups had a positive attitude about her in 2016.  Ekins doesn't offer an explanation of why these groups' attitudes toward Clinton took such a nosedive. It's likely that Trump and Republican rhetoric during the 2016 election ("crooked Hillary") was effective. 

But some of the damage may have been self-inflicted.  My own speculation is that Clinton's "basket of deplorables" comments really hurt her with some of these groups: a glance at the Racial/Identity Issues section of the chart above shows that these groups consider themselves more broadly tolerant than liberals probably perceive them to be.  It also seems plausible that her email server travails cost her some votes with the Anti-Elites group, as the issue painted Clinton as an elite to whom the normal rules don't apply.

Democrats may not be focusing on the right issues.  Among the issues for which there is a broad consensus across all five voter groups are support for the so-called temporary Muslim ban (although Ekins points out that this support may not be for the same reasons across all groups: Preservationists may support it for identity reasons, while Free Marketeers may support it for national-security reasons); opposition to Obamacare; opposition to single payer health care; and support for religious liberty.   There is also broad opposition to same sex marriage, and fairly broad opposition to abortion.   All of these issues have ignited passion among liberals during Trump's presidency.  But these issues may be among the toughest for Democrats to leverage to peel away voters from Trump's coalition.  Democrats may be better advised to focus on issues in which there is division among Trump's coalition, such as attitudes toward political compromise.  Continuing to hammer away at income inequality may also be a winner for Democrats: American Preservationists and Anti-Elites probably would be open to those arguments.  Democrats might also focus on issues on which Trump's coalition seems to be broadly sympathetic to liberal views, such as Medicare, Social Security and family leave. 

The clusters of issues I'm suggesting here, taken as a whole, strike me as the sort of moderate Democratic platform that Bill Clinton governed on in the 1990's.  For good or ill, that doesn't seem to be where the Democratic Party's energy and enthusiasm is coming from these days.  And it's possible that Democrats don't need to recalibrate to win during the Trump era; it may be that the issues that are energizing Democrats today will drive stronger turnout than they were able to achieve with Hillary Clinton at the top of the ballot in 2016, so that luring Trump voters away from voting Republican may not be necessary.