Much of the commentary on this month’s US presidential election result has painted the Trump victory as a revolt against globalization by those who suffered most greatly from it. There is a good reason for this: the state of the economy is usually a key factor in determining the vote, or as Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in 1992 put it more pithily: it’s “the economy, stupid”. But there are some reasons for caution regarding this explanation.
First of all, long-term political trends always worked against Clinton. In 2013, when Clinton’s public approval rating was overwhelmingly positive, the National Constitution Center cautioned that she needed to buck several trends to gain the presidency. Her party, the Democrats, have only twice held the presidency for more than eight years. They have never won more than three elections in a row after 1951, when presidents were restricted to two consecutive four-year terms. Since the 1970s, US voters have also preferred candidates who made their careers outside of Washington over those with extensive D.C. experience. The main reason that voters chose Trump was that they wanted change of various types, including putting a more conservative justice on the Supreme Court.
There are, of course, obvious economic problems in the US and high levels of dissatisfaction. The exit polls indicate that the overwhelming majority of voters are not happy with the state of the economy. This discontent is understandable: real median household income in the US has not yet recovered to its 2007 level, let alone its 1999 peak. Hourly wages have only recently returned to the level they were at when Obama took office. Even the pro-business Wall Street Journal has noted that globalization, particularly trade with China, has had negative effects on the earnings of working Americans.
Nonetheless, it is not so clear from exit polls that the economy cost Clinton the election. Those for whom the economy was the key issue favoured Clinton slightly. Like the popular vote itself, voters were closely divided when it came to their own financial situation. Over three-quarters of those who felt that their personal financial situation was worse than it had been four years ago voted for Trump; however, a larger proportion of voters felt that their financial situation had improved and their votes for Clinton counterbalanced the Trump votes. The truly hard-pressed did not vote: as in previous elections two-thirds of the electorate had above average household incomes.
Trump supporters were actually more likely to prioritise non-economic factors, perhaps because they were, as a group, better off than Clinton supporters. Rothwell and Diego-Rossell have noted that Trump supporters as a group earn relatively good incomes, especially considering their level of education, and are more likely to be working than the general population. Trump supporters are sceptical about trade in general and the counties most affected by trade with China voted for Trump in the primaries. At the same time, Trump voters in the November election did not live disproportionately in areas that were strongly affected by trade. What makes Trump supporters unusual is their high levels of economic anxiety, particularly given their incomes.
Compared with Clinton supporters, Trump supporters were also more anxious about immigration and terrorism. Immigration was an issue even though Trump supporters tend to live in areas without large numbers of immigrants. It may be the recentness of immigration rather than the scale of immigration that raised concerns. The fear of immigration also might reflect the fragility of the communities where Trump supporters live. Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rossell have characterised the pro-Trump areas as being “racially isolated white communities with worse health outcomes, lower social mobility, less social capital, greater reliance on social security income and less reliance on capital income .
An even odder concern is terrorism, yet that issue is probably what won Trump the election. In September 2016, the Pew Research Center found that 40% of Americans felt that a major terrorist attack on the U.S. was more likely than it had been right before 9/11. Even though the major terrorist attacks were outside Republican strongholds, fear reached historic heights early on only among the members of the GOP.
Trump supporters seem to have been very concerned by the threats posed by foreigners and those not like them. The most obvious symbol of this is Trump’s unfeasibly expensive wall with Mexico, which was part of his anti-terrorism, anti-immigration, and anti-drug strategies. The multi-faceted function of the wall might explain why Trump voters overwhelmingly supported it in CNN’s exit polls, despite being surprisingly divided on the deportation of working illegal immigrants.
Trump’s economic nationalism is as much about nationalism as it is about the economy. This nationalism can cause him to shoe-horn problems into a nationalistic framework even where they didn’t fit. A good example is Trump’s drug policy, which focusses on stopping opioids like heroin from Mexico and fentanyl from China. He ignores domestic factors, such as the role that prescription drugs have played in fostering drug abuse. The prescription opioid epidemic has not only fed into the heroin epidemic, but has killed over twice as many people in the U.S.
This over simplification is unfortunate because, unlike terrorism, the opioid epidemic is a serious problem in many states that voted for Trump. Along with suicide and alcoholism, it is a major factor in the failure of the U.S. to cut the deaths of middle-aged, non-degreed white men since the late 1990s and the decline in the life expectancy of their female counterparts. Although working-class white women still die at lower rates than similar men or blacks, the trend is troubling and without parallel in other rich countries. During the primaries, Guo noted that there was a strong correlation between the middle-aged white mortality rate and the vote for Trump, even when other explanations were taken into account. This correlation also exists for the general election, but may reflect the working-class white nature of Trump’s base.
Even though Trump’s plans to address the epidemic are inadequate, the opioid crisis also shows why some people were desperate for change. The opioid death rate has been increasing steadily since the late 1990s, but Congress only passed legislation targeting the epidemic last summer. It did not receive the necessary funding, even though this issue has bipartisan support. For people living in these areas, Clinton seemed unlikely to change Washington. Although they did not necessarily trust that Trump would care, he might at least improve the economy. Some Trump-supporting areas that had relatively nothing possibly figured that they had nothing to lose.
Christine Harlen is Lecturer in US Politics and International Political Economy at the University of Leeds.
Image: Michael Candelori CC by 2.0
