Votes of despair?

A few days ago, the New York Times had an article that mentioned "the despair in parts of rural America that helped fuel the rise of a figure like Mr. Trump."   That led me to wonder if Trump had any special appeal to people who were in "despair."  The General Social Survey has a question on happiness:  "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days - would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"  I ran logistic regressions of the choice between Democratic and Republican candidates and voting vs. not voting on happiness in presidential elections from 1972-2016 (omitting blacks, since they voted heavily Democratic in all elections).  The results: 

In every election, people who were happier were more likely to vote, and if they did vote, were more likely to vote Republican.  The estimated vote-happiness relationship was larger in 2016 than in any other election, and the estimated party-happiness relationship was stronger than average (3d out of twelve elections).  The variations are small enough so that they might the the result of chance, so I wouldn't put too much stock in the rankings.  However, there's certainly no evidence that Trump had a particularly strong appeal to unhappy people.

So why is this idea that Trump appealed to people who were discontented widely accepted?  The article I mentioned was a news story, not an opinion piece, and it treated the link  between despair and Trump as a fact,  not a hypothesis.  One factor is that it's widely known that conditions of life for people without a college degree have been declining, and that white people without a college degree voted  strongly for Trump.  Putting those together, it seems reasonable that people without a college degree have been growing more discontented, and that helps to explain their votes.  But as I've mentioned in several recent posts, while there's been some increase in discontent, it hasn't been very strong.  Another reason is that people who write about politics tend to forget that a lot of people don't vote, and that in the "lower" classes, however you define them, most people don't vote.  In another recent piece in the NY Times, Arlie Russell Hochschild says "faced with a coal miner suffering black lung disease, or a laid-off factory hand, liberals feel compassion. Faced, on the other hand, with a man in cowboy boots and red MAGA hat, arms defiantly folded, who dismisses climate science and insults overeducated 'snowflakes,' many see — and hate — 'the enemy.'

Yet what if these are one and the same man?"

 Of course, they could be, but it's more likely that the disabled coal miner or laid-off factory hand didn't vote, doesn't pay much attention to politics, and that his most deeply held opinion is that you can't trust any of them.