The Downwardly Mobile for Trump

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/opinion/campaign-stops/the-downwardly-mobile-for-trump.html

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What makes Americans receptive to what Donald J. Trump has been saying on the campaign trail?

We know from opinion polls that whites without college degrees provide his deepest well of support. Among these working-class individuals, one might think that Mr. Trump would do best with people with lower incomes and more tenuous connections to the job market. In accepting his party’s nomination, he claimed to be the voice of “laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals.” Shouldn’t the people in the worst economic circumstances be most receptive to that message?

A recent paper by Jonathan Rothwell, a senior economist at Gallup, based on 87,428 interviews conducted by the organization between July 2015 and July 2016, showed this seemingly surprising finding: Support for Mr. Trump wasn’t strongly related to income and employment. In fact, among whites with similar educational levels, those who held favorable views of Mr. Trump had higher incomes and were no more likely to be out of the work force than those who held unfavorable views of him.

But that doesn’t mean that economic distress is irrelevant to Trump’s supporters. Rather, the interviews show that people’s satisfaction with their standard of living, and their subsequent political choices, depends on more than how many dollars they bring home each week. Their happiness depends on their reference group: whom are they comparing themselves to?

People often compare their standard of living with the standard they experienced while growing up. The most dissatisfied individuals tend to be the ones who don’t think they have matched or exceeded their parents’ economic standing. One might fault them for their narrow focus on their own kin, but they have merely bought into the American idea of progress — which implies that every generation should have a better life than the previous one — and found their own situation wanting. Typical survey measures of income and employment don’t capture the influence of these glances back in time.

This principle suggests that we should expect greater support for Mr. Trump among the downwardly mobile — those who believe that they aren’t doing as well as the previous generation — even if their incomes aren’t that low.

The 2014 General Social Survey, conducted by the research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, asked a national sample of adults whether their standard of living was better, the same or worse than that of their parents. Among non-Hispanic whites age 25 and older who had completed less than four years of college, 53 percent said they were doing better than their parents. Another 27 percent said they were doing about the same, and 20 percent said they were doing worse. The last response is probably an underestimate. It’s embarrassing to admit to an interviewer that you aren’t doing as well as your parents did.

Let’s call non-college-educated whites who said they were doing worse the “downwardly mobile” and similar whites who said they were doing better the “upwardly mobile.” The answers of these two groups to questions in the 2014 survey foreshadowed the divisions that would emerge in the Trump campaign.

Take immigration. Respondents were asked whether they thought “the number of immigrants to America nowadays” should be increased, remain the same or be reduced. Among the downwardly mobile, 71 percent said the number should be reduced; compared with 46 percent among the upwardly mobile. Moreover, 48 percent of the downwardly mobile agreed that “immigrants take jobs away from people who were born in America,” compared with 38 percent of the upwardly mobile.

One can also see nascent support for Mr. Trump’s claim in his acceptance speech that “the system is rigged against our citizens.” When asked how proud they were of the way democracy worked in America, the downwardly mobile were more likely to say that they were “not very proud” or “not proud at all” than were the upwardly mobile, by 38 percent to 16 percent.

What’s more, the downwardly mobile expressed less confidence in the people running a range of institutions, including banks, major companies, our education system and Congress. They also projected their anxieties onto their children: 44 percent of the downwardly mobile thought that, when their children were their age, their children’s standard of living would be lower than theirs is now, as opposed to 20 percent of the upwardly mobile.

In their answers to all of these questions, downwardly mobile working-class whites showed a greater affinity for Mr. Trump’s themes than did the upwardly mobile. They were more troubled by immigration, more disappointed in American democracy, and more alienated from social and political institutions. It seems likely that the relative deprivation they felt made them more receptive to the positions Mr. Trump eventually staked out.

No other candidate in this race has addressed the concerns of downwardly mobile working-class whites so directly. In doing so, Mr. Trump has highlighted the disaffected downwardly mobile as a key voting bloc. These are the voters who will look for leaders who can restore their faith in progress — and promise that no matter how well things are going for them, their children will be better off.