Why Our Friends and Families Voted for Trump, and Why They Are Poised to Do It Again.
Trump called dead soldiers “suckers” and “losers;” he’s mocked the mentally handicapped; he stands accused by 26 different women of sexual assault and harassment. And yet many good people — the people we know and love — stand ready to vote for him on November 3rd. Why? How can we reconcile the votes of the people we love so much with the conduct and actions of a person we know to be grossly immoral? For the last 4 years I have pondered this question. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time pouring over every reputable study on why (mainly) white voters elected Trump as president. In this essay I will argue that my original idea — that economic hardships led droves of white people to vote for Trump — was wrong. I will then move through the studies on why white people voted for Trump and distill what the studies actually say. In the concluding remarks, I will ruminate on why our friends and families will still vote for Trump and how we should respond to their votes.
“You have no idea what it’s like in the midwest and south,” I told my wife the night of Trump’s stunning upset, “most of the cities looked bombed out, meth and opiate addiction runs rampant, and people feel like they have no opportunities and that politicians ignore them.” This was mine, and several other peoples’ theory on why white people voted for Trump in 2016. I call it the “Hillbilly Elegy” theory after JD Vance’s book which rose to prominence at the time. The problem is, the explanation is garbage.
The first challenge to this theory was the PRRI study which showed that working middle class whites preferred Clinton to Trump. Preferred. By almost a 2:1 margin. Hmmm. Like most anomalies, I found the study perplexing. And then continued right on with my economic insecurity argument. The second study was harder to ignore: “Living in an area with a high median income positively predicted Republican vote choice in 2016.” Again, the wealthy white, unlike middle class whites, preferred Trump. Me: But white people who voted for Trump are economically insecure, right? Wrong. “Economic anxiety [under Obama] was decreasing, not increasing,” the third, conclusive study said, “[and] what was distinctive about voting behaviour was NOT the outsized role of economic anxiety.”
If not economic anxiety, what factors drove our friends and families to vote for Trump? “Those who felt that the hierarchy was being upended — with whites discriminated against more than blacks,” Mutz writes, “Christians discriminated against more than Muslims, and men discriminated against more than women — were most likely to support Trump.” The Amherst study put it more bluntly: “We find that racist and sexist attitudes were strongly associated with vote choice in 2016, even after accounting for partisanship, ideology, and other standard factors.” So there it was: The feeling of losing your superior position in society, based on your whiteness, was the strongest indicator of whether or not you voted for Trump. Not class or economic anxiety, or feeling left behind or distrusting Hillary or whatever other excuse Trump voters and myself made up to make their votes more palatable. Just plain, cold, naked racism and sexism.
Once I accepted that racism and sexism were the determining factors in voting for Trump, I almost immediately jumped to a more personal question: Did my friends and family vote for Trump because they were racist and sexist? If I accept the meticulous research of top rank academics, why would the truth about my family and friends be any different? These thoughts rolled around in my head as I watched Breonna and George and Elijah die violently at the hands of police officers. As I watched my fellow Americans die from covid in outsized numbers when compared with other rich nations. As I saw the president and his colleagues work to make voting as difficult and restrictive as possible for all Americans. I watched all of this and saw my Trump-supporting family and friends not bat an eye, defiantly and continuously rationalizing the irrational policies and behaviors of Trump.
What could account for supporting Trump in the face of his overwhelmingly immoral, anti-democratic behaviour if not racism or sexism? Do you know of another force that so completely upends logic? So thoroughly anesthetizes the mind? And so totally and completely inhibits rational political thought? And does so in such a thorough way that the very people infected will argue vociferously about their immunity? “I don’t see color,” “I’m the least racist person you’ve ever met,” “I have black friends,” “Honestly, I just didn’t like Hillary’s demeanor,” say the most sexist, racist Trump supporters I know. Again, Mutz, this time more bluntly: “[the election of Trump] was an effort by members of already dominant groups to assure their continued dominance [over subordinate groups].” And we don’t do ourselves, our families and friends, or society any favors to pretend otherwise.
So how should we respond to our friends and family members who embrace Trump? Spoiler alert: I have no clue. While taking a class on my own racism, I asked the teacher, a prominent black female activist, how we should deal with friends and family who were unwilling to acknowledge their own racism. “If you maintain a relationship with people who are willfully racist” she replied assertively, “you are upholding the values of white supremacy.” Willfully racist is the important distinction here. Ok, no problem. Cutting ties with a family member who is willfully racist, flirts with white supremacy, and/or routinely engages in sexist, racist language seems like a no brainer. But what about the polite Trump voters? Our friends and family who do not see their own racism, who are not willful?
And this is where the essay stops. I would love to hear about your experiences and how y’all have decided to navigate the social and familial minefield that is the intersection between Trump, racism, and politics. I’ve done everything from deleting people on facebook to deleting people from my lives to acknowledging my own racism as a bridge and having hours long conversations with racist Trump voters only to end up where we started. Perhaps an individual’s reckoning with racism/sexism cannot be engendered by conversation. Maybe the conversion will happen when that person knows or loves someone affected by their behavior, like with queer rights. What I can say definitively is that I hope I’m not pondering this question for another four years, but fear that I might be.
