Abstract
ABSTRACTThe campaign leading to the 2016 US presidential election included a number of unconventional forms of campaign rhetoric. In earlier analyses, it was claimed that the Trump victory could be seen as a form of protest voting. This article analyzes the determinants of voters’ choices to investigate the validity of this claim. Based on a sample of the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, our analyses suggest that a Trump vote cannot be explained by a lack of trust in politics or low levels of satisfaction with democracy, as would be assumed given the extant literature on protest voting. However, indicators of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments proved to be important determinants of a Trump vote—even when controlling for more traditional vote-choice determinants. Despite ongoing discussion about the empirical validity of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments, both concepts proved to be roughly equally powerful in explaining a Trump vote.
Highlights
The election of President Donald Trump in November 2016 marked an important transition for the American political system
This article investigates the effect that this rhetoric might have had on individual voters: Was it associated with a different type of voting behavior than what has been observed in earlier US electoral studies? we build on European protest and extreme-right–voting research, which has shown that racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments are an important voting motive (Lubbers, Gijsberts, and Scheepers 2002)
The rhetoric about “draining the swamp” received ample media attention, our analysis suggests that it was not a major voting motive for Trump voters
Summary
The election of President Donald Trump in November 2016 marked an important transition for the American political system. Models that explain voting behavior tend to include long-term variables such as sociodemographic factors, partisanship, and ideology, as well as short-term variables such as issues and candidate evaluations (Campbell et al 1980; Miller and Shanks 1996). There is abundant evidence that short-term factors including economic evaluations, issue positions, and candidates’ characteristics significantly affect the choices that voters make (Fridkin and Kenney 2011; Nadeau and Lewis-Beck 2001). In addition to being a stable and cross-culturally equivalent measurement scale, anti-immigrant sentiments are highly effective in explaining an extreme-right vote (Cutts, Ford, and Goodwin 2011; Semyonov, Raijman, and Gorodzeisky 2006). Included in this article is a measurement of both racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments to assess which attitude had the strongest effect on a Trump vote
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