Middle Americas malaise helped Trump to victory, but he has no cure
Richard V. ReevesMonday, November 28, 2016
r many whites, and especially for white men, a vote for Donald Trump was a cry of pain. Leave aside that most of Trump’s voters did not attend rallies, and that few live in the bizarre, twitterspheric world of the Alt-right. His successful wooing of white middle America, especially in the Mid-West, and of white less-educated men, helped him to win the Presidency.
Many of his supporters are in pain. Some might seem angry. But anger is just pain in disguise. The malaise of white middle America can be seen in trends for mortality, life expectancy, suicide and opioid use. Perhaps it is not surprising that the areas where people are turning to oxycodone are also the ones that turned to Trump. Trump out-performed Mitt Romney in counties with the highest levels of premature mortality, according to our own analysis.[1] Data from the relationship in the six states that went from the Democrat column to the Republican one—Florida, Iowa, Michigan[2], Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—shows this correlation (counties above the line are those where Trump did better than Romney):
There are of course a huge number of overlapping variables at play here, including education, income, employment and so on. But to the extent that the mortality figures express some genuine malaise, it looks like this was in some way related to Trump’s victory. But what is the real cause of this middle-American malaise? Those on the political left think that the pain is caused by economic inequality, and that many of Trump’s supporters are simply misguided, having being misled. Bernie Sanders says that Trump’s “campaign rhetoric successfully tapped into a very real and justified anger.” To his mind, people are “tired of having chief executives make 300 times what they do, while 52 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent.” Well, maybe.
Meanwhile Jenny Beth Martin, president and co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, says that Trump’s victory is a validation of their agenda: “Repeal…Obamacare, protect our borders, stop illegal immigration, restore fiscal sanity and get the government off our backs and out of our lives.” Well, maybe. There is lots of work to be done to truly understand the complex picture that emerged on November 8. But it doesn’t look to me as if economics will take us very far in terms of understanding white pain, at least in any simple way. Scott Winship of the new thinktank Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity delves into the numbers, and concludes that “there is little empirical support for the idea that ‘it was the economy, stupid’.” I agree. This was an identity vote more than an income vote. Many white men, especially those of modest education, feel as if they are being overtaken and left behind. “It’s relative status, stupid!”
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2016/11/28/middle-americas-malaise/?utm_campaign=Brookings+Brief&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=38330624