On Modeling the Social-Psychological Foundations of Support for Donald Trump

• Published date: 01 November 2021
• Date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211022188
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211022188

American Politics Research

2021, Vol. 49(6) 551 –567

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211022188

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Article

Why did Americans vote for and support Donald Trump?

Trump’s status as a non-traditional, inexperienced outsider

has made the answer to this question considerably more elu-

sive than similar questions asked about other presidents.

Even intra-party dynamics appear different, with many

researchers embracing the idea that Trump supporters differ

in important ways from non-Trump supporting Republicans

(Barber & Pope, 2019; Blum & Parker, 2019; Reny et al.,

2019). These differences have elevated the accounting of

Trump support to a “key social-science challenge” (Federico

& de Zavala, 2018, p. 110).

What explanations does the literature offer? On the one

hand, the classical social-psychological antecedents of polit-

ical behavior (i.e., partisan and ideological identities) are

consistently strong predictors of Trump support (i.e., posi-

tive feelings toward him and vote choice) (Bartels, 2018). On

the other hand, an expanding literature has uncovered numer-

ous other deep-seated social-psychological factors that addi-

tionally predict Trump support. These factors range from

group orientations, such as racial prejudice and sexism, to

more general postures toward political power and culture,

such as anti-political correctness attitudes and conspiracy

thinking (e.g., Schaffner et al., 2018). While any one of these

factors is unlikely to supplant the role of partisan and ideo-

logical orientations on its own, they may still contribute to a

more complete accounting of Trump support, as others have

demonstrated.

Even though researchers now have a better grasp of which

social-psychological orientations might lead to support for

Trump, this literature has developed in a piecemeal fashion,

leaving questions about how to best model Trump support.

This can partially be attributed to Trump’s tactics catching

researchers off guard and without the necessary survey

instruments to test explanations against one another.

Consequently, many studies fail to include potentially con-

founding explanations of Trump support, leading to omitted

variable bias. Yet, other studies find that inclusion of appro-

priate controls can result in unstable estimates of the effects

of key social-psychological predictors (e.g., Grossmann &

Thaler, 2018), due to multicollinearity. Regardless of the sta-

tistical problem, our understanding of the attitudinal anteced-

ents of Trump support are being obscured.

In this study, we use unique data from the 2018 Cooperative

Congressional Election Study (CCES) and publicly available

data from the 2016 American National Election Study

(ANES) to demonstrate these problems. After observing

high correlations between constructs such as racial

1022188APRXXX10.1177/1532673X211022188American Politics ResearchEnders and Uscinski

research-article2021

1University of Louisville, KY, USA

2University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Joseph E. Uscinski, University of Miami, 240D Campo Sano Building, 1300

Campo Sano Blvd., Coral Gables, FL 33146, USA.

Email: uscinski@miami.edu

On Modeling the Social-Psychological

Foundations of Support for Donald Trump

Adam M. Enders1 and Joseph E. Uscinski2

Abstract

Scholars have identified many social-psychological factors correlated with support for Donald Trump; however, attempts

at modeling these factors tend to suffer from omitted variable bias on the one hand, or multicollinearity on the other.

Both issues obscure inferences. Using two nationally representative surveys, we demonstrate the perils of including or

failing to include many of these factors in models of Trump support. We then reconceptualize the social-psychological

sources of Trump support as components of a broader “profile” of factors that explains Trump support in 2018 and vote

choice in 2016, as well as attitudes about issues connected to Trump. Moreover, this profile—an amalgamation of attitudes

about, for example, racial groups, immigrants, and political correctness—rivals partisanship and ideology as predictors of

Trump support and is negatively related to support for mainstream Republican candidates. Our analyses suggest that Trump

benefited from activating dimensions of public opinion that transcend traditional party cleavages.

Keywords

Donald Trump, elections, vote choice, partisanship, ideology

552 American Politics Research 49(6)

resentment, sexism, and xenophobia, we demonstrate the

perils of both including the many hypothesized predictors of

Trump support in a single model, and of failing to include

many of such predictors.1 Undertaking a series of model

robustness checks, we find that inferences about the substan-

tive impact—including size, statistical significance, and

sign—of the many predictors of Trump support are highly

contingent on which of those predictors are included in the

model. To avoid such problems, we model Trump support as

a constellation, or “profile,” of attitudes and orientations that

are empirically related. The profile we construct either

matches or outperforms partisanship and ideology in predict-

ing Trump vote choice, general support for Trump, and a host

of attitudes about several of Trump’s core issues (e.g., build-

ing the U.S.–Mexico border wall). Importantly, this profile

does not merely capture partisanship or ideology in another

way; indeed, it is negatively correlated with support for

establishment Republicans running in the 2016 primaries.

Our findings have several methodological and theoretical

implications for the study of vote choice. Given that social-

psychological orientations toward social, racial, and political

“others” are, as the burgeoning literature on social identity

suggests (e.g., Mason, 2018), frequently related to each

other, perhaps such orientations should not be treated sepa-

rately. Our analyses empirically demonstrate the inferential

pitfalls of separately modeling constructs that have become

tightly interwoven over time. As polarization and sorting

have made it more difficult to disentangle inherently over-

lapping orientations, social scientific theories about which

orientations matter and when, and how to empirically deci-

pher the unique effects of such orientations, have not subse-

quently adjusted. Our results also demonstrate that significant

correlations between left-right predispositions and choices,

like partisanship and vote choice, and various social-psycho-

logical orientations, like xenophobia, imply little about the

precise nature of the partisan divide. Indeed, we find that

even though the average Trump supporter registers high lev-

els of racial resentment and xenophobia in the absolute, they

also register low or middling levels of sexism and conspiracy

thinking; likewise, Clinton supporters exhibit non-trivial lev-

els of anti-political correctness attitudes, even though there

are significant differences between Trump and Clinton sup-

porters when it comes to these orientations. Thus, our analy-

ses highlight blind spots in how survey questions designed to

estimate orientations like sexism and xenophobia are inter-

preted and applied to models of vote choice.

The Many Predictors of Support for

Donald Trump

Since 2015, scholars across social scientific disciplines have

attempted to explain why Americans support Donald Trump.

Traditional explanations, such as partisanship and ideology,

account for considerable variance in attitudes toward Trump,

just as they have for most presidents since the advent of

modern polling (Bartels, 2018). Even so, these factors cannot

explain why some key, historically Democratic districts sup-

ported Trump, nor can they account for intra-party differ-

ences in choosing Trump over his Republican competitors. A

complete accounting of the sources of Trump’s support

requires more than the traditional model of vote choice has to

offer. In attempting to decipher precisely what additional

factors may play a role in Trump support, researchers have,

for the most part, made inferences about which elements of

Trump’s personality and communication style might reso-

nate with the mass public. This exercise has resulted in many

explanations for Trump support, spanning the sociodemo-

graphic, psychological, and cultural.

To begin, examinations of sociodemographic explana-

tions have garnered only weak support. Education, for exam-

ple, is negatively associated with Trump support, but it is

unclear whether something about a lack of educational

attainment itself makes Trump more appealing or lower edu-

cational attainment merely serves as a proxy for other orien-

tations (Silver, 2016). Others saw a theme of working class

vulnerability in Trump’s campaign communications (Bucci,

2017; Morgan & Lee, 2018), but a wide range of analyses

employing different models, data, and assumptions suggest

that—at best—economics is an inconsistent predictor of sup-

port (e.g., Green & McElwee, 2018; Mutz, 2018; Ogorzalek

et al., 2020; Silver, 2016).

Of course, it is easy to find examples of racism, sexism,

xenophobia, conspiracism, and authoritarianism in Trump’s

rhetoric (e.g., Finley & Esposito, 2019; Jamieson & Taussig,

2017; Oliver & Rahn, 2016; Sanchez, 2018); thus, these ori-

entations have constituted fruitful avenues for explaining

Trump support. Many researchers have found a connection

between Trump support and various racial orientations—

from white identity to racial prejudice (Abramowitz &

McCoy, 2019; Craig et al., 2018; Donovan & Redlawsk,

2018; Engelhardt, 2019; Green & McElwee, 2018; Jardina,

2019; Lajevardi & Oskooii, 2018; Lopez Bunyasi, 2019;

Schaffner et al., 2018; Sides et al., 2019). Immigration being

a key element of Trump’s platform, xenophobic tendencies

also correlate with Trump support (Hooghe & Dassonneville,

2018; Manza & Crowley, 2018; Wright & Esses, 2019). The

same can be said about attitudes toward women, from hostile

to ambivalent sexism (Bracic et al., 2019; Cassese & Holman,

2019; Deckman & Cassese, 2019; Frasure-Yokley, 2018;

Schaffner et al., 2018; Setzler & Yanus, 2018). Importantly,

the literature also finds that attitudes about racial groups,

immigration, and gender each played a greater role in

explaining vote choice in 2016 than in previous elections,

suggesting that Trump activated these orientations in a way

that previous Republican presidential candidates had not

(Donovan & Redlawsk, 2018; Reny et al., 2019; Sides et al.,

2017; Valentino et al., 2018, but see Al-Gharbi, 2018).

Finally, several broad orientations toward political power

and culture can be found among both Trump’s rhetoric and

the psychology of his supporters. Negative attitudes toward