Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support

[Nevilledog]

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/activating-animus-the-uniquely-social-roots-of-trump-support/D96C71C353D065F62A3F19B504FA7577

Data and Methods

To test the proposition that Trump support is uniquely predicted by animosity toward groups aligned with the Democratic Party, we turn to the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group (2018), which conducted multiple survey waves in partnership with the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) and YouGov.6 This publicly available dataset includes several thousand respondents who were reinterviewed online across four survey waves: 2011, 2016, 2017, and 2018.7 Importantly, the first wave of respondents were likely unfamiliar with Trump as an explicitly partisan figure and can be used as a baseline for comparison with later waves. In other words, those who would become Trump supporters in later waves were (likely) not yet Trump supporters in 2011.8 This allows us to empirically gauge the extent to which reservoirs of group animosity existed in the mass public, regardless of extant party identity prior to Trump, that he could then draw upon during his political career.

Importantly, while we analyze panel survey data, we cannot treat this as a true panel because we do not have measures of our dependent variables in 2011. Our primary interest, therefore, is to investigate whether a citizen’s affect toward politically aligned social groups during an earlier point predicts the degree to which that same citizen approves of Trump at a later point (Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck [2019] use a similar approach). Our secondary objective is to analyze the predictive power and magnitude of the 2011 group attitudes on Trump support relative to their effect on later feelings toward the parties and various party elites. By examining the difference between precursors to Trump support versus support for the parties and mainstream political figures, we can discern the sociopolitical uniqueness of Trump support in the American electorate.

Respondents were asked to indicate their feelings toward four Democratic-aligned social groups in 2011: African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and Gays and Lesbians (alpha = 0.78, mean = 0.60, SD = 0.21). Respondents also indicated their feelings toward two Republican-aligned social groups in 2011: whites and Christians (Mason 2018; r = 0.46, mean = 0.75, SD = 0.20)9. Our analysis employs an OLS regression model with the following general specification:

where Group Animus captures the average feeling thermometer rating of the party-aligned group(s) examined in each model (again, Democratic-linked groups are African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and Gays and Lesbians; Republican-linked groups are whites and Christians). These thermometers are recoded to range from 0 to 1, with higher values indicating greater animosity toward the group(s) in question. PID indicates respondent i’s party identification in 2011, measured on a seven-point scale ranging from “Strong Democrat” (0) to “Strong Republican” (1); Ideology indicates respondent i’s self-placement on the five-point ideology scale in 2011 ranging from “Very Liberal” (0) to “Very Conservative” (1); and

includes sociodemographic variables measured in 2011 including political interest, race, religion, educational attainment, gender, age, and income (see Supplemental Appendix for additional details).

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