THREAD: Please stop giving Donald Trump credit for white working-class voting in 2016. (with @Nick_Carnes_)

Journalists have been saying that Donald Trump has a special relationship with the white working class since before Trump even had the Republican nomination. The problem is, the claim is bogus.

Most of the “evidence” out there is some combination of cherry-picked anecdotes (interesting, but not scientific), correlations between county characteristics and county-level Trump support (ecological fallacy), or exit-poll analyses

that focus on the voting behavior of people with and without college degrees (a much-too-blunt way to measure class in the US, where having a college degree doesn’t guarantee a professional job and a high income,

and people without college degrees often do quite well for themselves – just ask Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg).

In a new paper out in @PoPpublicsphere, we look at data (not anecdotes) on the income, education, race, occupation, and self-identified class (not just college attainment) of individual American voters (not counties) from three major election surveys.

We find that Trump did NOT have a special relationship with white working-class Americans. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592720001267

He did fine with white working-class voters, but not better than expected given how Republican candidates for president have done in recent years.

Specifically: (1) Most Trump voters were not white working-class people, and white working-class voters made up the same share of Trump’s voters as Romney’s.

(2) Looking just at white working-class people, the percentage who voted Republican increased by less in 2016 than it had in 2012 (Romney), 2000 (Bush), or even 1996 (Dole).

(3) White working-class people weren’t overrepresented among Obama-Trump “switchers” as far as we can tell; and

(4) White working-class people don’t seem to have surged for Trump in the swing states that cost Clinton the election.

What we do find is clear evidence that the share of white working-class voters who support Republicans has gone up slowly and steadily since 1992. That’s an important trend, and it deserves more attention from scholars and journalists. But it’s not a Trump thing.

If people look at 2016 and think, “Trump’s unique candidacy got white working-class Americans fired up,” they’re taking away exactly the wrong lessons from 2016.

2016 was another example of the long, slow process by which the white-working class has become an important part of the Republican coalition. There’s your story.