Trump support is not normal partisanship

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The refrain "this is not normal" has been repeated among opponents of Donald Trump since before the 2016 election was decided. This certainly feels true to scholars of American politics and to the electorate at large.

So what is "normal" and how can we determine whether Trump is in fact appealing to different motives than "normal" partisan battles? In some preliminary and ongoing research, we have found evidence that the appeal of Donald Trump is empirically different from the appeal of the Republican (and, obviously, Democratic) Party. In particular, it is characterized more by out-group hatred than by in-group affection.

Social sorting and intolerance

In recent decades, it has become generally well-established that certain social groups tend to be Republican (i.e., whites, Christians, rural voters, men, etc.), while others tend to be Democratic (i.e., non-whites, non-Christians, metropolitan voters, women, etc.). Partisan identities have converged with ideological, religious, racial, and other cultural and geographical identities. In Lilliana Mason's recent book, this is referred to as "social sorting," and is significantly related to an increasingly emotional and visceral dislike of partisan opponents.

The social psychologist Marilynn Brewer, along with a number of her colleagues, has also repeatedly found that white individuals with a very well-sorted set of national, religious, political, occupational, and recreational identities are significantly less accepting of cultural diversity and affirmative action, and more intolerant of social out-groups including African Americans, Mexican immigrants, Muslims, and gays and lesbians, even when controlling for the effects of age, education, and ideology.

This increasing alignment between our partisan and other identities pushes us toward intolerance of out-groups. This is particularly true among the Republican Party, which is made up mostly of voters with fewer, and better-aligned religious and racial identities.

We have previously shown that while Democrats come from a variety of racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, nearly all Republicans fit the White Christian profile. Further, as voters' racial and religious identities align with their party, their partisan identity strengthens. For Republicans, this means that the closer they feel to fellow whites and Christians, the closer they feel towards their political in-group – the Republican Party. An ideal recipe for intolerance of "the other."

In-group love and out-group hate

However, Brewer has also argued that preferential treatment of in-group members does not always coincide with hostility toward out-group members. Sometimes we are motivated by wishing for our own group to win, and other times we are motivated by hatred toward "the other." So how exactly do the various social identities associated with the parties affect in-group affection or out-group animosity? Is it possible for partisans to be motivated by a preference for victory separately from simple hatred of "the other?" And, furthermore, would feelings toward Trump himself — often characterized by distinctly hostile out-group attitudes — be any different from feelings toward the two parties?

Some well-timed data

Conveniently for us, the Democracy Fund's Voter Study Group survey includes several thousand respondents who were reinterviewed (online) across three survey waves: 2011, 2016, and 2017. Importantly, the first wave of respondents in 2011 was not yet familiar with Trump as a political candidate, and therefore can be used as a baseline against which to compare later waves. In other words, those who would become Trump supporters today were (largely) not yet Trump supporters in 2011. This allows us to examine the extent to which pre-Trump attributes contribute to post-Trump approval – and figure out the types of people who will eventually turn to Trump.

In order to examine this, we used the data to predict 2017 Trump approval (as well as Republican and Democratic Party approval) based on 2011 feelings toward a number of party-linked groups, controlling for party and ideological identification in 2011, along with 2011 measures of socio-demographic variables (i.e., political interest, race, religion, educational attainment, gender, age, and income).

Feelings toward each group were measured using a "feeling thermometer," which ranges from 0 (very cold feelings) to 100 (very warm feelings). For comparability with the Trump approval measures (coded to range from 0 to 1), we recoded all thermometer changes to range from 0 to 1 instead of 0 to 100.

In the graphs below, higher levels of the feeling thermometer (FT) toward each group represents warmer feelings in 2011. 2017 approval indicates the predicted value of approval for Trump, the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party in 2017 based on the 2011 feelings toward the specified group, controlling for all of the other variables.

Feelings toward Democratic-linked groups

The social groups linked to the Democratic Party that we measure in 2011 include African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and LGBT people. We should expect that warmer feelings toward these groups will increase approval of Democrats, as a form of "in-group love." When you like the people who make up the party, you like the party. The question for Trump and GOP approval is whether their approval is linked to disliking the people who make up the opposing party.

In these graphs, we consistently find that warmer feelings toward these groups in 2011 predict higher 2017 approval of the Democratic Party.

We find mixed evidence of a link between out-group hatred and Republican Party support. Negative feelings toward African Americans and Hispanics do not drive future Republican Party support, but negative feelings toward Muslims and LGBT people do slightly drive future Republican Party support.

This is not the case for Trump support. For all four groups, support for Trump is strongly associated with dislike of these Democratic Party-linked groups. In every case, negative feelings toward these groups has the strongest effect on Trump support – far stronger than for Republican Party support.

For Democrats, in-group love drives party support. For Republicans, out-group hatred plays a mixed role. But for Trump supporters, out-group hatred wins the day.

Feelings toward Republican-linked groups

The Republican-linked groups with feeling thermometers in 2011 were whites and Christians. For these groups, we should expect to see in-group love affecting Republican Party support and possibly Trump support. We don't know whether dislike of these groups should drive Democratic Party support.

In fact, the data demonstrate strong effects of in-group love for Republicans. Support for the GOP is strongly related to feelings of warmth toward whites and Christians. On the other side, Democratic approval is not at all related to dislike of whites or Christians. If anything, positive feelings for these Republican-aligned groups increases support for the Democratic Party – a testament to the diverse racial and religious composition of the party, and further evidence for the increased tolerance that often emerges from complex and diverse groups.

Trump support is somewhere in between. It does increase as feelings toward Whites and Christians grow warmer, but not as strongly as the effect for the Republican Party.

What drives Trump support?

Warm feelings toward Whites and Christians increase support for both Trump and the GOP. What differentiates Trump approval from overall approval of the Republican Party is the additional role of consistent hatred towards Democratic-aligned groups. As social sorting promotes both in-group love and out-group hatred, we see that both are used to Trump's advantage. In contrast, it is mainly in-group member positivity that relates to support for the Republican Party.

While we see these clear relationships between group sentiments and Trump support, it is important to underscore that voters' cold and warm feelings towards racial and religious groups shown in our graphs predates Trump's candidacy. Trump did not create out-group animosity. He simply tapped into these existing reservoirs of negative out-group feelings and activated them to his benefit. As Trump's rhetoric about blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims repeatedly exploited anger towards these groups — much to the chagrin of his own party's leaders — he solidified his support among voters who already held disdain and resentment towards a diversifying American landscape.

This work is not the first to find that Trump support is driven by out-group hatred. In the new book Identity Crisis, political scientists find that even in the Republican primary, out-group hatred predicted support for Trump, but not for Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or John Kasich.

This means that support for Trump is qualitatively different from the support that Republicans have traditionally received. Even in the 2016 Republican primary election, Trump was uniquely attracting voters who were feeling increasingly uncomfortable with racial, religious, and social diversity. The Trump campaign attracted specifically those voters who were the most intolerant of a diverse society. We tend to think of partisans as being generally intolerant of outsiders, but these findings suggest that Trump supporters are unique in terms of their out-group hatred.

This all suggests that the Trump era is ushering in a new "normal" to American politics, in which support is derived not just from appealing to in-group affection, but from the outright belittlement and denigration of the opposition party and the social groups that comprise its members. This is not a requirement of, or an inevitable consequence of a diversifying society.

However, a case could be made that the American electorate is facing an electoral choice between social justice and traditional social hierarchy. If the Democratic and Republican parties decide to openly address the United States' legacy of racial violence and intolerance — a reconciliation that has not yet occurred — it might generate a social backlash that looks a lot like the predictors of Trump support.

Lilliana Mason (@LilyMasonPhD) is an assistant professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Julie Wronski (@julie_wronski) is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Mississippi. John V. Kane (@uptonorwell) is an assistant professor at New York University's Center for Global Affairs.

Vox – All

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