Dr. Peter Francia recently completed the article, “The White Working Class, Union Households, and Trade: Will the Trump Coalition Endure?” for the journal, Society.
Abstract: Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election caught many political experts by surprise. Looking to uncover the reasons for this surprising outcome, social scientists presented several explanations in the election’s aftermath. In this article, I discuss one of these explanations: Trump’s success in winning white working-class voters by an overwhelming margin. I also discuss his success in narrowing the advantage that Democratic presidential candidates typically enjoy with voters in union households. Using data from the 2012 and 2016 National Election Pool (NEP), and the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), the results in this work show that Donald Trump not only won the support of white working class voters and that he was competitive with voters in union households, but that he significantly improved the Republican share of the presidential vote from four years earlier among voters in these two blocs, including in three critical battleground states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Trump’s protectionist position on free trade and his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which differed from previous Republican presidential nominees in recent elections, were especially popular with white working-class voters and those in union households. By expanding previous Republican margins with white working-class voters and by narrowing the Democrats’ typical union household advantage, Trump secured himself victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which ultimately won him the election. Whether or not Trump is able to repeat this in 2020 against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will likely determine if he is re-elected. Moreover, if the Trump coalition proves enduring, it could well shape presidential elections and their outcomes in years to come.