ABSTRACT
Two familiar claims about the 2016 election are: first, that the battleground states of the Midwest were pivotal to the election's outcome; and second, that Trump rode to victory on the shoulders of “the white working class,” that is, white voters without college degrees. Our research confirms these propositions but also quite seriously complicates them. Only in the South and Midwest did Trump win more votes from less educated white voters than Romney won in 2012 – and in fact, we find that in the Northeast white voters without four-year college degrees broke away from Trump. White voters in the South and Midwest also differed from the rest of the white electorate in the strength of their wish for a domineering leader who would “crush evil.” That wish, which is strongly associated with prejudice against minorities, immigrants, Muslims, and women, was voiced exceptionally often in the South and Midwest among white voters with college degrees as well as without them. We establish these points with data drawn from the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES), to which we contributed an attitude scale that proved highly predictive. What we learn from this data is that “the white working class” is polarized and diverse, like the rest of the electorate. White voters without college degrees are no more easily pigeonholed than college educated voters, and what they share in the South and Midwest often divides them from their counterparts elsewhere. Above all, what Trump voters share is prejudice. That prejudice unites them across educational and regional lines, and often assumes authoritarian forms.
