Study: racism and sexism predict support for Trump much more than economic dissatisfaction

German Lopez · Wednesday, January 04, 2017, 1:43 pm

The study comes with a great chart to prove it.

Following Donald Trump’s election, the media tried to identify several indicators for why he won. Was it the opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic? Poor health outcomes? The economy?

A new paper by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta puts the blame back on the same factors people pointed to before the election: racism and sexism. And the research has a very telling chart to prove it, showing that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology:

[Click on link below to view the chart}

As the paper acknowledges, clearly economic dissatisfaction was one factor — and in an election in which Trump essentially won by just 80,000 votes in three states, maybe that was enough to put Trump over the top. But the analysis also shows that the bulk of support for Trump — perhaps what made him a contender to begin with — came from beliefs rooted in racism and sexism.

Specifically, the researchers conclude that racism and sexism explain most of Trump’s enormous electoral advantage with non-college-educated white Americans, the group that arguably gave Trump the election. “We find that while economic dissatisfaction was part of the story, racism and sexism were much more important and can explain about two-thirds of the education gap among whites in the 2016 presidential vote,” the researchers write.

Now, the researchers didn’t measure just any kind of racism and sexism. For racism, they evaluated the extent that someone acknowledges and empathizes with racism — acting as a proxy measure for actual racist beliefs. (Research shows that these kinds of measures correlate with actual racism, which is tricky to measure in a more direct way since people will do what they can to avoid looking racist.) For sexism, they evaluated someone’s hostile sexism — which, through several questions, gauges hostile attitudes toward women. (For more on how hostile sexism is typically measured and compares with other types of sexism, read Libby Nelson’s explanation for Vox.)

To gauge these measures, the researchers looked specifically at national survey data from the online polling firm YouGov, taken during the last week of October.

YouGov’s data for likely voters had Hillary Clinton up by 3 points, which isn’t far from her final 2.1-point victory in the popular vote — suggesting that it’s fairly accurate.

Within this data, the researchers looked at respondents’ answers to various questions about the economy, racism, and sexism. The questions typically measured how much a respondent agreed with statements like, “I am angry that racism exists,” and, “Many women are actually seeking special favors, such as hiring policies that favor them over men, under the guise of asking for ‘equality.’” The researchers then matched responses to the scores shown in the chart above.

This isn’t the first study to produce these results. It’s been consistently demonstrated that racism and sexism played a big role in Trump’s Election Day victory. But knowing and proving the link between Trump and bigotry is crucial for anyone interested in defeating a candidate like him — or even Trump himself — in the future.

This isn’t the first study to link bigoted beliefs to support for Trump

By now, multiple analyses have found that support for Trump tightly correlates with racist and sexist beliefs.

Several polls found that Trump supporters were more likely to profess negative views of black people, Muslims, and Latinos, as well as concerns that immigrants threaten US values. One telling study, conducted by researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Stanford University shortly before the election, found that if people who strongly identified as white were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in 2042, they became more likely to support Trump.

Another set of studies, conducted by researchers Carly Wayne, Nicholas Valentino, and Marzia Oceno, found that measures of benevolent sexism — meaning more traditional, chivalrous views of women and men’s proper roles in society — didn’t correlate closely with support for Trump. But measures of hostile sexism did, suggesting that sexism in support of Trump seems to be more about hostility toward women than old-fashioned views on gender roles.

None of this is too surprising — Trump, after all, ran a campaign in which he made explicit racist and sexist appeals. He characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.” He called for banning Muslims — an entire religious group — from the US. He said a US judge should recuse himself from a Trump University case due to his Mexican heritage. He referred to black and Latino people’s lives as hell, calling for police to adopt “stop and frisk” — a practice deemed unconstitutional in New York City because it was used in racist ways — to help protect “inner cities.” He suggested Fox News host Megyn Kelly was tough on him at a debate because she was menstruating. He was recorded on tape bragging he can sexually assault women (“grab ’em by the pussy”) because he’s a celebrity. And that’s far from all.

Read more
http://www.vox.com/identities/2017/1/4/14160956/trump-racism-sexism-economy-study