Red and Blue Voters Live in Different Economies – The New York Times

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, scholars, journalists and ordinary citizens battled over whether economic anxiety or racial and cultural animus were crucial to the outcome.

Soon a consensus formed, however, among most — though not all — political analysts, in support of the view that attitudes about race, immigration, sexism and authoritarianism had more of an effect on Trump voters than the experience of economic hardship.

Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, summarized this argument in a May 2018 essay, “Racial Attitudes and Political Correctness in the 2016 Presidential Election.” Grossmann wrote that he had “reviewed nearly every academic article containing the name ‘Donald Trump’ ” and concluded:

The dominant findings are clear: attitudes about race, gender and cultural change played outsized roles in the 2016 Republican primaries and general election, with economic circumstances playing a limited role.

But economic decline was — and is — a compelling factor in generating conservative hostility to social and cultural liberalism.

Let’s start with a paper Brookings released on Sept. 19, “America has two economies — and they’re diverging fast,” by Mark Muro, a senior fellow, and Jacob Whiton, a research analyst, which lays the groundwork for a more detailed analysis of concerns that help drive voters’ support for Trump.

Muro and Whiton compare a broad range of economic indicators that reflect conditions in all 435 House districts at two different junctures: in 2008 and after the midterm elections, in 2018. Over that period, the number of Republican-held districts grew from 179 to 200 and the number of Democratic-held districts fell from 256 to 235.

Muro and Whiton report that not only have red and blue America experienced “two different economies, but those economies are diverging fast. In fact, radical change is transforming the two parties’ economies in real time.”

The accompanying graphic demonstrates the divergence between red and blue America.

The average of Democratic district’s gross domestic product grew from $35.7 billion in 2008 to $48.5 billion in 2018, an inflation-adjusted average increase of 35.9 percent. In Republican districts, G.D.P. fell from an average of $33.3 billion to $32.6 billion over the same decade, a 2.1 percent decline.

The same partisan split — gains for Democratic, losses for Republicans — took place in median household incomes. In Democratic districts, household income rose from an average of $54,000 to $61,000, a 13 percent increase. In Republican districts, household income fell from $55,000 to $53,000, a 3.6 percent decline.

Similar trends are reflected in education and productivity patterns.

The share of adults with college degrees grew from 28.4 to 35.6 percent in Democratic districts; from 26.6 to 27.8 percent in Republican districts. In Democratic districts, productivity per worker grew from $118,000 to $139,000; in Republican districts from $109,000 to $110,000.

The most important finding in the Muro-Whiton analysis is that even though Democrats in 2018 held fewer seats, 235, than they did in a decade earlier, 256, the share of the nation’s total gross national product created in Democratic districts grew from 60.6 to 63.6 percent.

“This increase is absolutely striking,” Muro wrote in an email. Democrats are winning in the “very powerful, dense, and prosperous economic areas that increasingly dominate the American economy.” In other words, Muro said, “Democrats control the places that are most central to American economic power and prosperity.”

In their paper, Muro and Whiton write:

To be sure, racial and cultural resentment have been the prime factors of the Trump backlash, but it’s also clear that the two parties speak for and to dramatically different segments of the American economy.

A growing body of work demonstrates that scarcity, economic stagnation and relative decline are powerful factors driving intensified conservatism on issues of race, culture and immigration.

I asked Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about the rise of authoritarian right-wing movements worldwide, to comment on the Muro-Whiton paper.

Inglehart made the case that a “combination of economic insecurity and cultural insecurity has contributed to the Trump vote.”

He went on:

For most of the twentieth century, working class voters in developed countries mainly supported left-oriented parties, while middle class and upper class voters supported right-oriented economically-conservative parties.

In the post-World War II period, however, Inglehart noted, “generations emerged with a postmaterialist outlook, bringing declining emphasis on economic redistribution and growing emphasis on noneconomic issues.” It was “this, plus large immigration flows from low-income countries with different cultures and religions,” Inglehart wrote, that “stimulated a reaction in which much of the working class moved to the right, in defense of traditional values.”

Most critical, in Inglehart’s view, is that treating economic and social issues separately creates a false dichotomy:

The interaction between insecurity caused by rapid cultural change and economic insecurity drives the xenophobic reaction that brought Trump to power and is fueling similar reactions in other high-income countries. And the rise of the knowledge society is driving this polarization even farther.

In a June 2009 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, “Threat causes liberals to think like conservatives,” Paul Nail, a professor of psychology at the University of Central Arkansas, and four colleagues found that

Liberals became more conservative following experimentally induced threats. In fact, the threats consistently caused liberals to become as conservative as conservatives chronically were.

In one test, for example, half of the participants were prompted to think about the threat of death by asking them to describe in writing “the feelings that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and “What do you think will happen physically as you die and once you are dead?” The other half was asked to write about the bland experience of watching television.

The authors found that the threat of death caused those who previously demonstrated a “liberal openness” to experience shifted “toward conservative closure.” Similar shifts from left to right occurred under different variations of the threat scenario.

Nail and his co-authors wrote that “political conservatism has psychological properties that make it particularly appealing when vulnerability is dispositionally or situationally salient,” before adding: “We conclude that significant threats always induce a tendency toward conservative social cognition.”

Four other psychologists — Jaime L. Napier at N.Y.U.- Abu Dhabi; Julie Huang at Stony Brook; Andrew J. Vonasch at the University of Canterbury; and John A. Bargh at Yale — addressed this question from the opposite direction: What happens to conservatives when the sense of threat or insecurity is decreased?

In their March 2018 paper, “Superheroes for change: Physical safety promotes socially (but not economically) progressive attitudes among conservatives,” the four authors conducted a series of experiments including one in which they induced “feelings of physical safety by having participants imagine that they are endowed with a superpower that rendered them invulnerable to physical harm.”

The superpower manipulation “had no effect on Democrats’ level of social conservatism,” they wrote, but Republicans “reported being significantly less socially conservative in the physical invulnerability condition.”

Napier and her three colleagues used the same superpower manipulation in a second experiment designed to measure liberal and conservative resistance to social change based on responses to two questions: “I would be reluctant to make any large-scale changes to the social order” and “I have a preference for maintaining stability in society, even if there seems to be problems with the current system.”

Those surveyed, Napier reports, were made to “feel significantly safer when they imagine having physical invulnerability.” While liberals remained consistent in their support of change, conservatives shifted in a liberal direction. Among conservatives, “resistance to change was significantly lower in the invulnerability condition,” she and her colleagues wrote.

The authors conclude:

Decades ago, Roosevelt noted that fear can paralyze social change; here, we offer empirical support for his observation by showing that ameliorating fear can facilitate social change. Just as threat can turn liberals into conservatives, safety can turn conservatives into liberals — at least while those feelings of threat or safety last.

There are some logical inferences that can be drawn from all of this.

Why does Trump spend so much time and energy keeping people off kilter? He has no interest in increasing the sense of security of his base. To do so would only make these voters more receptive to Democratic appeals.

The relative material deprivation of many Republican voters that continued into the first two years of the Trump administration reinforces their sustained dedication to Trump, even as the regions of the country where they disproportionately live fall further behind.

Conversely, the exceptional success in 2018 of Democratic House candidates in well-to-do, highly educated, formerly Republican districts suggests that Democrats gain from prosperity, affirming the Inglehart thesis that liberal values thrive under conditions of economic security.

As the 2020 election approaches, we can expect Trump not to be deterred by the prospect of impeachment. He will embrace it. He has proved repeatedly — compulsively, really, both in business and in politics — that he is willing to gamble on his ability to profit from a climate of chaos and threat, to rely on ever-present sense of crisis to fortify and expand his base.

What we don’t know, and don’t want to find out, is how much damage he is prepared to inflict.

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