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The most common Obama-to-Trump voter is a white American who wants government intervention in the economy but holds negative views toward minorities.

Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Menahem Kahana/Getty Images and Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.

It has been more than seven months since a plurality of Americans put Donald Trump into the White House, and we are still grappling with how it happened. How should we understand the forces that gave Trump the election? A new data set moves us closer to an answer: in particular how to understand the voters who supported Barack Obama in 2012 only to back Trump in 2016. Its lessons have far-ranging implications not only for diagnosing Trumps specific appeal but for whether such an appeal would hold in 2020.

Jamelle Bouie isSlates chief political correspondent.

Two reports from the Voter Study Group, which conducted the survey, give a detailed look at these vote switchers. (You can learn more about the nonprofit survey herewhats key is that its longitudinal nature allows researchers to draw deeper conclusions on the issues that motivated voters.) One, from George Washington University political scientist John Sides, looks at racial, religious, and cultural divides and how they shaped the 2016 election. The other, from political scientist Lee Drutman, takes a detailed look at those divides and places them in the context of the Democratic and Republican parties. Starting in different places, both Sides and Drutman conclude that questions of race, religion, and American identity were critical to the 2016 outcome, especially among Obama-to-Trump voters. Thats no surprise. Whats interesting is what the importance of identity says about Donald Trumps campaign. Put simply, we tend to think that Trump succeeded despite his disorganized and haphazard campaign. But the Voter Study results indicate that Trump was a canny entrepreneur who perceived a need in the political marketplace and met it.

Whether or not they identified with a party, most people who voted in the 2016 election were partisans. Approximately 83 percent of voters were consistent partisans, writes Sides. In other words, they voted for the same major party in both 2012 and 2016. This is the typical case. But about 9 percent of Donald Trumps voters had backed Obama in the previous election, equivalent to roughly 4 percent of the electorate. Why? The popular answer, or at least the current conventional wisdom, is economic dislocation. But Sides is skeptical. He concludes that economic issues mattered, but no more or less than they did in the 2012 election. The same goes for views on entitlement programs, on trade, and on the state of the economy in general. The weight of those issues on vote choice was constant between the two election years.

What changed was the importance of identity. Attitudes toward immigration, toward black Americans, and toward Muslims were more correlated with voting Republican in 2016 than in 2012. Put a little differently, Barack Obama won re-election with the support of voters who held negative views toward blacks, Muslims, and immigrants. Sides notes that 37 percent of white Obama voters had a less favorable attitude toward Muslims while 33 percent said illegal immigrants were mostly a drain. A separate analysis made late last year by political scientist Michael Tesler (and unrelated to the Voter Study Group) finds that 20 to 25 percent of white Obama voters opposed interracial dating, a decent enough proxy for racial prejudice. Not all of this occurred during the 2016 campaigna number of white Obama voters shifted to the GOP in the years following his re-election. Nonetheless, writes Sides, the political consequences in 2016 were the same: a segment of white Democrats with less favorable attitudes toward these ethnic and religious minorities were potential or actual Trump voters.

What caused this shift in the salience of race and identity (beyond the election of a black man in 2008) and augured an increase in racial polarization? You might point to the explosion of protests against police violence between 2012 and 2016, and the emergence of Black Lives Matter, events that sharply polarized Americans along racial lines. And in the middle of 2015 arrived the Trump campaign, a racially demagogic movement that blamed Americas perceived decline on immigrants, Muslims, and foreign leaders, and which had its roots in Donald Trumps effort to delegitimize Barack Obama as a noncitizen, or at least not native-born.

But the fact that Trump primed and activated racial views doesnt immediately mean those white Obama voters acted on them. Which brings us to Drutmans analysis of the Voter Study Group.

For the first time in recent memory, populist voters didnt have to prioritize their values.

Drutman plots the electorate across two axesone measuring economic views, the other measuring views on identityto build a political typology with four categories: liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and populists. Liberals, the largest single group, hold left or left-leaning views on economics and identity. Libertarians, the smallest group, hold right-leaning views on economics but leftward beliefs on identity. Conservatives are third largest, with right-leaning views on both indices, while populiststhe second largest groupare the inverse of libertarians, holding liberal economic views and conservative beliefs on identity.

Most populists, according to Drutman, were already Republican voters in the 2012 election, prizing their conservative views on identity over liberal economic policies. A minority, about 28 percent, backed Obama. But four years later, Clinton could only hold on to 6 in 10 of those populist voters who had voted for Obama. Most Democratic defectors were populists, and their views reflect it: They hold strong positive feelings toward Social Security and Medicare, like Obama voters, but are negative toward black people and Muslims, and see themselves as in decline.

This is a portrait of the most common Obama-to-Trump voter: a white American who wants government intervention in the economy but holds negative, even prejudiced, views toward racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. In 2012, these voters seemed to value economic liberalism over a white, Christian identity and backed Obama over Romney. By 2016, the reverse was true: Thanks to Trumps campaign, and the events of the preceding years, they valued that identity over economic assistance. In which case, you can draw an easy conclusion about the Clinton campaigneven accounting for factors like misogyny and James Comeys twin interventions, it failed to articulate an economic message strong enough to keep those populists in the fold and left them vulnerable to Trumps identity appeal. You could then make a firm case for the future: To win them back, you need liberal economic populism.

But theres another way to read the data. Usually, voters in the political crosscurrents, like Drutmans populists, have to prioritize one of their chief concerns. Thats what happened in 2008 and 2012. Yes, they held negative views toward nonwhites and other groups, but neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney ran on explicit prejudice. Instead, it was a standard left vs. right ideological contest, and a substantial minority of populists sided with Obama because of the economy. That wasnt true of the race with Trump. He tied his racial demagoguery to a liberal-sounding economic message, activating racial resentment while promising jobs, entitlements, and assistance. When Hillary Clinton proposed a $600 billion infrastructure plan, he floated a $1 trillion one. When Clinton pledged help on health care, Trump did the same, promising a cheaper, better system. Untethered from the conservative movement, Trump had space to move left on the economy, and he did just that. For the first time in recent memory, populist voters didnt have to prioritize their values. They could choose liberal economic views and white identity, and they did.

Top Comment

"He tied his racial demagoguery to a liberal-sounding economic message, activating racial resentment while promising jobs, entitlements, and assistance." This. Trump ran as a weird combination of a WWE goon and FDR. More...

This fact makes it difficult to post hypotheticals about the election. Its possible a more populist campaign would have prevented those Obama defections. But a Trump who blurs differences on economic policy is a Trump who might still win a decisive majority of those voters who want a welfare state for whites. In the context of 2016, that blend of racial antagonism and economic populism may have been decisive. (The other option, it should be said, is that with a more populist presidential campaign, Democrats might have activated lower-turnout liberal voters, thus making Obama-to-Trump voters irrelevant.)

The good news for Democratsand the even better news for the populist leftis that unless Trump makes a swift break with the Republican Party, his combined economic and identity-based appeal was a one-time affair. In 2020, if he runs for re-election, Trump will just be a Republican, and while hes certain to prime racial resentment, hell also have a conservative economic record to defend. In other words, it will be harder to muddy the waters. And if its harder to muddy the waters, then its easier for Democratsand especially a Democratic populistto draw the distinctions that win votes.

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Why Obama Voters Defected - Slate Magazine