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How Despair Helped Drive Trump to Victory


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2017 Nov 17, 1:49am   851 views  0 comments

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The role of the rural vote in Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. Presidential election has received widespread coverage. But suggesting that rural frustration with political insiders and years of perceived neglect was in itself enough to deliver Trump to the White House overlooks other key factors that saw the Republican candidate out-perform in areas ravaged by decay.

Although Trump’s rural edge certainly contributed to his victory, it was not sufficient to swing the election on its own or to support a theory that a “rural revolt” handed him the win. Instead, Trump’s combined rural and small city over-performance, and Clinton’s under-performance, particularly in the industrial Midwest, was key to Trump’s unanticipated victory. To understand the election outcome it is critical to understand what drove voters in those areas to cast a ballot for Trump.

In many of the rural areas and small cities where Trump performed better than expected or where Clinton performed worse than expected, economic distress had been building and social conditions breaking down for decades. The places that experienced the largest voter shifts in 2016 were not all among the poorest places in America, though Appalachia certainly holds that distinction. But they are places that are generally worse off today than they were a generation or two ago, with far fewer manufacturing and natural resource industry jobs that once provided reliable, livable wages and benefits to those without a college degree. Certainly de-industrialization is not a new phenomenon in the U.S., but its impacts have been unevenly distributed.

Our INET research, published in the Journal of Rural Studies, used county-level election data from 2012 and 2016 alongside demographic, economic, and health research from multiple sources to probe key sources of Trump’s support. We found that nationally, and especially in the industrial Midwest, Trump’s average over-performance – defined as the difference between his percentage share of the vote compared to that of Romney four years earlier – was greater in areas of higher economic, social, and health distress.



Of course the above is not an exhaustive list of factors that likely influenced the election, and many of these factors are strongly correlated, making it difficult to disentangle and rank in terms of influence. We also don’t know from the data whether the most economically distressed residents voted for Trump, or if it was comparatively less distressed residents who, out of anxiety and frustration with the deprivation they saw around them, went for the Republican nominee.

Ultimately, what these descriptive findings suggest is that Trump performed well within these landscapes of despair – places that have borne the brunt of declines in manufacturing, mining, and related industries since the 1970s and are now struggling with opioids, disability, poor health, and family problems. Just as decades of declines in secure and livable wage jobs, resource-disinvestment, and social decay have made some places in the U.S. more vulnerable to the opioid scourge, the same forces made some places more susceptible to Trump’s quick-fix populist messages.


More: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-despair-helped-drive-trump-victory
#Economics #FlyOverCountry
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