The Psychology of Populist Voting: Race and Immigration in the 2016 US Election

• In Event: The Political Geography of Immigration Attitudes and Populist Voting

Abstract

In the 2016 presidential elections, the man who became the 45th president of the United States unequivocally won the white vote. Although one dominant narrative around the election was about poor, working-class whites, I will demonstrate that Donald Trump’s white support was not determined solely by demographics but by the ideology of whiteness. According to a research report by the Pew Research Center using validated voter files, Trump won whites making $30,000 or more, while Clinton won whites making less than $30,000 by one point. Trump won both white women and white men. Among the ages of 18-49, Trump won white men, while Clinton won white women. Among ages 50 and older, Trump won both white women and men. Clinton won white college graduates, while Trump won whites without college degrees. Finally, Trump won the suburban and rural votes (Cohn, 2018; Pew Research Center, 2018). What was it about Trump’s campaign message that propelled the majority of whites to vote for him? Did the fact that the Republican nominee based his campaign largely on immigration lead to his winning the white vote? I answer these questions by analyzing a subset of Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s campaign speeches from the American Presidency Project repository and pointing out how their rhetoric was fundamentally different. I also make use of the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2016 Time Series Study. In this article, I posit that understanding the psychology behind populist voting helps us understand how “groupness” operated in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Ultimately, I argue that the psychological need to belong and the ways in which Trump was more successful than Clinton at priming belonging among his supporters ultimately led to a Trump victory.

Author

• Yalidy M. Matos, Rutgers University