The Pew survey I mentioned in my previous post had a series of questions about "how much respect do you think Donald Trump has" for various groups "a great deal, a fair amount, some, or none at all." Then the same questions were asked about how much respect Hillary Clinton had for the groups. The averages, ranked from greatest to least average respect for the group:
Trump Clinton
White people 3.23 3.03
Men 3.21 2.77
Veterans 2.84 2.73
Women 2.19 3.16
Blue collar workers 2.64 2.66
Black people 2.31 2.84
Evangelical Christians 2.66 2.42
Hispanic people 2.16 2.85
Immigrants 2.00 2.93
Muslims 1.86 2.93
People who support [opponent] 1.91 1.91
The standard errors are about .03 or .04. The ratings aren't surprising--Trump is seen as having substantially less respect for women, black and Hispanic people, immigrants, and Muslims, and somewhat more respect for white people, men, veterans, and evangelical Christians. However, it's noteworthy that Trump and Clinton are rated almost exactly the same in respect for blue collar workers--this is one of many pieces of evidence that contradicts the popular story that working class voters turned to Trump because they thought that liberals were condescending to them. It's also notable that Clinton was seen as having pretty high respect across the board--her perceived respect for Evangelicals, which was lower than her perceived respect for any group except Trump supporters, was higher than Trump's perceived respect for six of the groups.
What difference did these perceptions make? I regressed intended vote on each candidate's perceived respect for the groups (one half of the sample was asked about women, men, whites, blacks, Hispanics, and veterans; the other about Muslims, evangelicals, immigrants, blue collar workers, and people who supported the other candidate). The logistic regression coefficients, with positive values meaning that more perceived respect for the group goes with more support for the candidate (standard errors are typically about .2 or .3, and standard errors of the differences about .3):
Trump Clinton
White people -0.31 -0.03
Men 0.12 -0.09
Veterans 0.66 1.14
Women 1.13 0.32
Blue collar workers 1.10 1.19
Black people 1.17 1.06
Evangelical Christians 0.34 0.91
Hispanic people 0.74 0.62
Immigrants 0.57 0.04
Muslims 1.53 0.72
People who support [opponent] -0.13 0.77
I don't think that perceptions of respect are necessarily causes of the way that people vote: to some extent, probably a large extent, people are rationalizing the way they voted. But the way that people rationalize their actions is still interesting.
A large coefficient could mean that a group is held in high esteem (that people think it should be respected) or regarded as important in some sense. But from that point of view, the coefficients for white people and men are puzzling. Another factor could be whether respect from the candidate in question could be taken for granted. For example, there wasn't much doubt that Hillary Clinton respected women, and it didn't make much difference in support for her; there was a lot of doubt about whether Trump did, and it made a lot of difference in support for him. So the fact that perceived respect for men and white people didn't matter could be because most people thought they'd be all right regardless of which candidate won (this contradicts another popular story, about how Trump supporters were motivated by perceived threats against whiteness or masculinity).
The combination of these principles seems to make sense of the coefficients, with one exception: the difference in the effect of Trump and Clinton's perceived respect for supporters of their opponent. Clinton gained from being seen as respecting Trump voters; Trump didn't gain from being seen as respecting Clinton voters. This pattern suggests there's a bit of truth in the "liberal condescension" story--that on the average, people cared more about whether Clinton respected them than whether Trump did.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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