Grifman wrote: ↑Mon Oct 11, 2021 12:05 amI'm looking at people who voted for Obama and then moved to Trump.
Sure and the trouble is that there are no simple causal relationships such as just saying it was racism. It is a lever so to speak and one that just happened to be significant that year. The electorate shifts from year to year and the various issues that drive people wax and wane with each election. The electorate that voted for Obama in 2012 wasn't the same one for Trump v. Clinton in 2016. Big picture though lots of smart people said it was a combination of race, economics, and populism. There are raging academic debates about the influence of each variable on the election. A good example is
this article talking about some studies conducted over the last few years. The one described in the article in particular shows that working, white class Democrats moved to Trump mostly due to racism and sexism but there also is some economics/populism mixed in as well.
Pacific Standard Magazine wrote:To the dismay of many, President Donald Trump has amped up his racist rhetoric of late, sending out angry, misleading tweets about Latin-American immigrants. Tufts University scholar Daniel Drezner argues this is his attempt "to ensure that his loyal base supporters are sufficiently energized to come out and vote GOP in the midterms."
Drezner doubts this will work. But a new scholarly analysis suggests Trump's instinct that racial prejudice drove him to victory is spot on.
"The 2016 campaign witnessed a dramatic polarization in the vote choices of whites based on (their level of) education," writes a research team led by political scientist Brian Schaffner of the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. "Very little of this gap can be explained by the economic difficulties faced by less-educated whites. Rather, most of the divide appears to be associated with sexism, and denialism of racism."
In the journal Political Science Quarterly, Schaffner and his colleagues note that a significant split between the preferences of highly educated and less-educated white voters is a relatively new phenomenon.
Edit: Updated with link to the original paper -
here - and grabbed the beginning of their conclusion.
Scaffner et. al. wrote:The 2016 campaign witnessed a dramatic polarization in the vote choices of whites based on education. In this paper, we have demonstrated that very little of this gap can be explained by the economic difficulties faced by less educated whites. Rather, most of the divide appears to be the result of racism and sexism in the electorate, especially among whites without college degrees. Sexism and racism were powerful forces in structuring the 2016 presidential vote, even after controlling for partisanship and ideology. Of course, it would be misguided to seek an understanding of Trump’s success in the 2016 presidential election through any single lens. Yet, in a campaign that was marked by exceptionally explicit rhetoric on race and gender, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that voters’ attitudes on race and sex were so important in determining their vote choices.
How might have racism and sexism mattered for affecting the final outcome? One way to approach this question is to consider how the vote might have differed if whites without college degrees had the same average levels on the racism and sexism scales as whites who have college degrees. If we make such an adjustment in our data, we find that Trump’s total two-party vote share would have declined by 2 points. In other words, if non-college educated whites became somewhat more progressive in their attitudes toward racism and sexism so that they matched those of college educated whites, Clinton would have won the popular vote by 4 points instead of 2 points. Given the narrowness with which Clinton lost states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida, such a shift could have had a dramatic effect in terms of the Electoral College outcome.