What's Killing Trump's Voters?
When globalism and other structural economic changes in the 1970s and beyond left the less-educated behind, it is not unfair to say that white Americans were far more disappointed and resentful than, say, blacks and Hispanics, for whom broken promises were nothing new.
It is to the left-behind crowd, whose demographic profiles closely resemble those of Donald Trump's base, that Trump speaks most directly and effectively.
"In terms of demographics, Trump's supporters are a bit older, less educated and earn less than the average Republican," Real Clear Politics reported in September, citing YouGov polls.
The report by Stanford political science professors David Brady (who also is a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution) and Douglas Rivers, chief scientist at YouGov, found that slightly more than half of Trump's supporters were women. About half of his supporters were between 45 and 64 years of age, another 34 percent were over 65 years old and less than 2 percent were younger than 30.
One-half of Trump's voters had a high school education or less, and about 19 percent had a college or post-graduate degree, the authors said. More than a third of his supporters earned less than $50,000 per year, while only 11 percent earned more than $100,000 per year. "Definitely not country club Republicans," the professors concluded, "but not terribly unusual either."
What unites Trump's supporters is a profound sense of discontent, betrayal and abandonment by a country and economy that promised them a better life than what they're struggling through.
Rod Dreher of The American Conservative calls them "the dispossessed," a group characterized by a strong sense that something owed to them has been taken away by today's elites -- including immigrants, minorities and other "special interests" who elites have told them are the real enemies of their upward mobility.
Trump's campaign, as well as those of Ben Carson and other insurgents in this Year of the Political Outsider, benefits hugely from such attitudes of discontent.
But what I don't hear from Trump supporters with whom I have talked is a strong degree of trust in Trump to keep his promises, either. After all, they've been burned before. To many of them, Trump's promises seem to be less important than his presence. He "tells the truth," they tell me, by which they mean that he seems to feel their pain.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
