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Category: Project

Description: To evaluate the claim that white, working-class voters were a crucial block of support for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, this article offers two sets of results. For the first, self-reports of presidential vote in 2012 and 2016 from the American National Election Studies (ANES) show that Obama-to-Trump voters and 2012 eligible non-voters composed a substantial share of Trump's 2016 voters. These voters were also more likely to be members of the white working class. Because the ANES has a somewhat coarse occupation-based measure of the working class, and has only a modest sample size, a complementary analysis is offered that merges county vote tallies in 2012 and 2016 with the public-use microdata samples of the 2012-2016 American Community Surveys. For this second piece of analysis, areal variation across 1,142 geographic units that sensibly partition the United States shows that Trump's gains in 2016 above Romney's performance in 2012 are strongly related to the proportion of the voting population in each area that is white and working class. This strong relationship holds in the six states that Trump flipped in his 2016 victory, and it varies little across other agglomerations of competitive and non-competitive states. Taken together, these results support the claim that Trump's appeal to the white working class was crucial for his victory.