Populism of the past

Today, "populism" is usually a negative term, basically meaning bombastic, authoritarian, and incompetent (this article is an example).  Things used to be different.  In 1972, Irving Kristol (a conservative) started an article by asking "What is populism and why is everyone suddenly saying such nice things about it?"  Jack Newfield and Jeff Greenfield (liberals) published a book called A Populist Manifesto which started from a similar point--that lots of people were calling themselves populists--before making a case for progressive populism.  They held up Robert Kennedy's 1968 campaign as a model for what they were proposing, and Eugene McCarthy's 1968 campaign as a sort of negative model.  The idea was that Kennedy tried to understand white working-class voters, while McCarthy ignored or dismissed their concerns. They said that if the Democrats followed McCarthy's example, the white working class would turn to people like Richard Nixon and George Wallace.  Similar claims are still made today--that if the Democrats had followed Robert Kennedy's example, they would have had more success in holding on to working-class voters.

In May 1968, a Gallup poll asked about hypothetical races between Nixon, Wallace, and the th(ree leading Democratic contenders, making it possible to compare the support for McCarthy and Kennedy. There were substantial differences--bigger than I expected.  First, Kennedy got 86% of the hypothetical vote among blacks, while McCarthy got only 46% (with 36% saying they'd vote for Nixon).   I don't know why McCarthy did so poorly--maybe it was because he had challenged Lyndon Johnson, who was still popular among blacks.   Because of this difference, I restricted the rest of the analysis to non-blacks.

McCarthy did substantially better than Kennedy among college graduates, although both of them ran behind Nixon (McCarthy trailed by 36%-50%, while Kennedy trailed by 19%-64%).  Kennedy did better among people without a high school diploma (who were almost 40% of the sample).  Income was measured with 11 categories, so it's more convenient to compute the mean income by vote.  The average income of Kennedy supporters was only a little higher than the average of Wallace supporters and undecideds, and substantially lower than that of Nixon supporters.  (The differences among Kennedy, Wallace, and undecideds were not statistically significant).  The average incomes of McCarthy supporters was closer to that of Nixon supporters than to either Wallace supporters or undecideds.

At that time, the Gallup poll asked about the occupation of the "chief wage earner."  McCarthy did considerably better among professionals and managers, and Kennedy did somewhat better among all of the other occupational groups.

So in terms of demographics, the Newfield/Greenfield account holds up.  But support for Wal]lace was almost exactly the same in the hypothetical race with Kennedy as in the one with McCarthy (actually a little higher with Kennedy).  That is, although Kennedy appealed to the kind of people who were inclined to support Wallace--less educated, lower incomes, lower-status occupations--he didn't seem to appeal to the people who were inclined to support Wallace.  86% of the people who said they'd support Wallace in a three-way race involving McCarthy said they'd support him in a three-way race involving Kennedy.  There was considerably more movement between Nixon and the possible Democratic nominees.

Kennedy and McCarthy didn't do as well as Humphrey in a hypothetical three-way race--I wouldn't put much weight on that, simply because people may have been more familiar with Humphrey.*  But McCarthy did a little better than Kennedy among whites, almost exactly balancing Kennedy's advantage among blacks. So it looks like Kennedy would have attracted different voters, but not necessarily more voters.

*In terms of demographics, Humphrey's support was in between Kennedy's and McCarthy's.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research

Family or skills?

I've written about public opinion on several aspects of immigration, but there is one that I haven't considered:  whether decisions about who to admit should give more weight to "merit." This issue also hasn't received much attention in surveys, but in 2007, 2013, and 2017, there was a relevant question:  "When the US government is deciding which immigrants to admit to this country, should priority be given to people who have family members already living in the US, or should priority be given to people based on education, job skills and work experience?"  The overall distribution of opinions:

                   Family    Work
2007             34%         51%
2013             28%         59%
2017             44%         46%

The difference between times is statistically significant.  There also are shifts in the relation with partisanship--I show the percent saying family minus the percent saying education, skills, and experience:

                   R            D     I
2007           -29         0     -22
2013           -30      -25     -38
2017           -29     +20       -3

Republicans were almost exactly the same at all three times, but Democrats and Independents moved towards education and skills between 2007 and 2013 and then towards family between 2013 and 2017.  Another way to put it is that there were moderate differences by party in 2007, small differences in 2013, and large differences in 2017. 

I don't remember if immigration policy was particularly in the news in May 2007 or April 2013, but in August 2017 the Cotton-Perdue bill, which would shift the priority away from family ties and towards skills, had just been introduced.  My guess is that Democrats and independents were reacting against the proposal, but that raises the question of why Republicans didn't move in favor of education and skills.  It may be because Donald Trump hadn't emphasized the issue in his campaign or his presidency up to that point--he'd focused on illegal immigration and vetting for terrorist sympathies.  So Democrats may have been more sensitive to proposed changes. 

In the last few months, Trump has started pushing for changes in immigration law; ending "chain migration" and the "lottery system" have become two of his favorite twitter themes.  So if this question is asked in the near future, I think Republicans will shift in favor of skills, and Democrats and Independents will shift further against it.  I also think that overall support for skills will decline, because Trump's remarks last week linked the issue to race in the public mind.  A shift to skills would almost certainly shift the composition of immigrants towards whites.  However, although the idea of a skill-based system had been discussed by people who were interested in public policy, it hadn't received a lot of news coverage, so the average person answering the question probably didn't think about this implication.  Blacks were more likely than whites to favor family ties, but the difference was small (43.5% vs. 36%).  But after last week, race will be the first thing that many people think about; maybe his base will move towards favoring skills, but blacks, Hispanics, and many whites will move in the other direction. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

"People love me. . . . Everybody loves me"

I've had several posts questioning the claim Donald Trump had a strong connection to the public (this one, for example).  But what if we focus on less educated people (often miscalled the "working class"), who did vote for him in large numbers?  A Pew survey in October 2016 asked if Donald Trump would be a great, good, average, poor, or terrible president if elected, and asked the same question about Hillary Clinton.  The averages by education (some college or less vs. degree or more), with great=5....terrible=1.

                              No degree       degree
Trump                        2.49              2.09
Clinton                       2.56              3.03

There was little difference among people without a college degree, but Clinton rated a little higher.  She was much higher among people with a college degree.

The same question had also been asked in a survey from April 2011, which asked about some people who were being mentioned as possible candidates for the Republican nomination.  That group happened to include Donald Trump.

                              No degree       degree

Trump                         2.56            2.10
Romney                      3.08            3.04
Palin                           2.51            2.10
Huckabee                   3.20            2.80
Ron Paul                    2.82            2.61
Gingrich                    2.68            2.46
Bachmann                 2.66            2.38

            Despite everything that happened between April 2011 and October 2016, the average assessment of Donald Trump among both educational groups was almost the same at the two times.  All of the potential Republican candidates got higher ratings from less educated people--the difference was small for Romney, but large for Trump and several others.\


\In December 2007, the same question was asked about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

                             No degree       degree

Obama                       3.27            3.44
Clinton                       3.14            3.08

Clinton's rating among college graduates was about the same in 2007 and 2016, but her rating among people without a college degree dropped substantially.  What happened?  My first thought is that the accumulation of scandals or quasi-scandals might have had more impact on less educated voters, who might pay more attention to personality than ideology.  I also have the impression that her association with Bill Clinton's administration, a period of declining unemployment and even wage growth, counted for more in 2008 than in 2016, partly because it was more recent then and partly because her time as Secretary of State intervened. 

But the overall point is that Trump's success in 2016 was more about the weakness of the opposition than about any positive appeal.  Of course, he had a lot enthusiastic supporters--in a country of 320 million, even a small minority can be a lot of people.  But the public as a whole, and even the less educated part of the public as a whole, were not that enthusiastic.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

What have reformicons learned?

Ross Douthat has a column called "What has Mitt Romney learned?"  The idea is that Romney's opposition to Trump is praiseworthy, but that he had helped to pave the way for Trump by running as a traditional pro-business conservative in 2012 and making no effort to offer anything to the working class.  It all seemed reasonable until this passage near the end "there is a small caucus in the Republican Party for a different way, for a conservatism that seeks to cure itself of Romney Disease by becoming genuinely pro-worker . . . It basically consists of Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of (ahem) Utah, plus perhaps Arkansas’s Tom Cotton and a few other figures ..."

Rubio ran for the Republican nomination in 2015-6.  He got lots of media coverage and seemed to be well financed, but didn't get many votes.  Those that he got weren't mainly from the working class, but from "establishment Republicans."  That is, when working class voters were offered a choice between the leading "pro-worker conservative" and Donald Trump, they unhesitatingly went for Donald Trump.  I don't find this hard to understand--if you read the elite media, you knew that Rubio was supposed to be a reform conservative, but in the debates he was just one more guy talking about how conservative he was and how Hillary Clinton would do irreversible harm to the America we knew and loved.  

What would a pro-worker conservatism be like?  Douthat links to a piece by Pete Spiliakos, which says that the problem with the recent tax bill is that its benefits are skewed towards high earners, with too little going to the middle and working classes--in other words, exactly what Democrats are saying.  A reasonable short definition of the difference between left and right on economic issues is that the left is in favor of using the power of the state to help people with low and moderate incomes at the expense of people with high incomes, and that the right opposes that.  So a pro-worker conservatism would have to involve some move to the left, because being pro-worker is a basic principle of the left.  Of course, it could involve more than that--for example, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit but cutting back on the minimum wage, or reducing occupational licensing--but it can't avoid it entirely.  

However, as I have observed before, both politicians and intellectuals in the Republican party seem to be consumed by the desire to prove how conservative they are, and how strongly they oppose progressivism and all of its works.  With politicians, this means that if someone compromises, he or she is vulnerable to being pushed out by someone who promises to take an even harder line.  With intellectuals, it means that even those who want reform assume that any reform has to come from the right and therefore convince themselves that people like Rubio, Lee, and Cotton might be the answer.  The result is that both establishment and reform conservatism are ineffectual.

Still searching

The AP recently had a story in which they went to "the heart of Trump country," specifically Sandy Hook, Kentucky, "isolated in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains."  Apparently a number of people said they were tired of hearing about the Trump voters in Appalachia mourning for the days when coal was king, according to this story by Philip Bump, and observed that plenty of Trump voters could be found in affluent suburbs.  I have made the same complaint myself in the past, but as Bump pointed out, in Elliott County (where Sandy Hook is), there was a large swing to Trump.   So if you're looking for people who were attracted to Trump, rather than people who just voted for him because he was a Republican, it's a defensible choice.

I looked more systematically, using these county-level election results for 2012 and 2016.  These were compiled by volunteers, so there may be some errors, but I checked some cases and they seemed good.  In 2012, the mean county-level Republican share of the vote was 59.8%, and in 2016 it rose to 63.5%.  This shows two things--that the Republicans tend to do better in the less populous counties, and that this tendency became stronger in 2016.  There are about 3,000 counties in the United States; here is the geographical distribution of the 100 with the biggest pro-Republican swing between 2012 and 2016:

Iowa             21
Ohio             20
Missouri       12
Illinois            6
Indiana           6
Tennessee       6
Kentucky        5
Wisconsin       5
West Virginia  4
Virginia           3
New York        3
Minnesota        3
North Dakota   2
Vermont           1
South Dakota   1
Pennsylvania   1
Vermont           1

Elliott County had the biggest swing.  The counties that moved towards Trump were overwhelmingly in the Midwest (broadly defined)--there were only a handful in the Northeast, none on the Pacific coast, and none from any Southern states except Tennessee and Virginia.  A significant number are in Appalachia, but most of them aren't.  I don't know anything about most of the counties on the list, so I can't offer any thoughts on what they have in common, but it seems like journalists looking for "Trump country" should broaden their focus--in particular, Iowa deserves attention.  The one thing I can say is that they mostly had small populations--the biggest was Schuylkill County, PA, whose biggest city is Pottsville (home of some of my ancestors).

I also calculated the counties with the biggest swing to the Democrats.  Their distribution:

Texas                   18
California            15
Georgia               12
Virginia               11
Utah                     8
Arizona                4
Illinois                 4
North Carolina     4
Kansas                 3
New Jersey          2
Pennsylvania       2
New York            2
Indiana                2
Massachusetts     2
Maryland             2
Arkansas             1
Connecticut         1
Montana              1
New Mexico        1
Ohio                     1
Tennessee             1
Washington          1
Wisconsin             1
Wyoming             1

A lot of large cities appeared on the list--Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and Dallas counties, as well as Harris County (Houston), Fulton County (Atlanta), and King County (Seattle).  There were also some affluent suburban counties, like Fairfield (CT), Westchester (NY), Somerset and Morris (NJ), and Johnson (KS).  They were less geographically concentrated than the counties with the biggest Republican swings,  The shifts were also smaller--the biggest swing to the Democrats was in Parmer County (TX), where the Democratic share went from about 20% to about 30%.  There were about 350 counties in which the Republican share increased by more than 10%.*

The one clear thing is that the urban/rural split got bigger, and the urban swing to the Democrats was not just in "blue states."  An interesting question is what happened in Georgia--none of the nearby states had nearly as many counties that shifted to the Democrats.

PS: This is a convenient place to look at results for individual counties since 1920.

*If you consider Republican losses, the contrast is less striking--there were a number of counties in Utah and Idaho where the Republican share dropped by 20% or more, presumably because of shifts to Evan McMullin.  But it's still substantial--there were only about 40 counties in which the Republican share dropped by more than 10%.

Christmas bonus

My last post mentioned Trump's approval ratings among college graduates, but didn't show them.  Here they are, with a comparison to Obama at the same points in his presidency.

Trump's approval rating at the beginning was almost 30 points behind Obama's (36% vs. 66%).  Obama's approval declined substantially during his first year, so the gap has narrowed to 20 points (32% vs. 52%).  That's 14 points behind Obama's lowest approval rating (46% at the end of 2013). 

I mentioned "style" as a factor in relative approval in my last post, and one of the examples I was thinking of was Trump's blustering about how nations that voted against his policy in the UN had better not come asking for aid.  I haven't seen any polling results on this specifically, but I looked for parallels and found a question from 2001:  "Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Countries that receive substantial military or economic aid from the United States should support U.S. positions when casting votes at the U.N."  The percent agreeing (of those who had an opinion), by education:

Not HS grad     88%
HS grad            92%
Some college   84%
College grad    74%
Grad educ        69%

Or to put it another way, about 10% of people who didn't attend college disagreed, vs. over 30% of people with graduate education. This survey was taken only a week or two after 9/11, which may have affected the totals--a survey in the mid-1990s found only about 55% agreeing on a similar question.  But I doubt that the circumstances would have much effect on the educational difference. 

[Source:  Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

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Education and presidential approval

During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised a large infrastructure program, major restrictions on international trade, and eliminating tax loopholes that benefited wealthy people.  As President, he's followed standard Republican economic policy--cut taxes and regulations on business and try to repeal the Affordable Care Act--and the "populist" elements have been pretty much forgotten.

Has the difference between promises and policies led to a change in the social composition of his support?  The Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center has more or less weekly data on presidential approval ratings broken down by various factors.  I calculated his average approval rates among people with and without a college degree in the first five surveys of his presidency (Jan-Feb) and the most recent five (Nov-Dec).  In the first five, his approval was 44.8% among people without a college degree and 36.6% among people with a college degree, for a difference of 8.2; in the last five, it was 38.4% and 32.0%, for a difference of 6.4.  That is, less educated people are still more likely to approve of Trump, although the gap may have closed a little.

I also looked at Obama's approval ratings among people with and without a college degree, using the first five surveys in his presidency, and then the last five in every year of his presidency (including 2009).  The results:

Obama's approval rating among more educated people relative to less educated people rose pretty steadily over his time in office.  At the beginning, he had only slightly higher approval ratings among college graduates (66% to 64%); by the end, it was a pretty large gap (61% to 53%).  It would be interesting to try to figure out the exact timing--was it a gradual shift or did it correspond to some events--but that would take more time than I can afford to spend on this. 

This does not mean that Trump is more popular than Obama was among people without a college degree:

His approval ratings among this group, even at the beginning of his presidency, were somewhat below Obama's average.  The striking difference in approval ratings between Trump and Obama is among people with a college degree.  

My tentative interpretation is that the differences in relative approval ratings are mostly about style rather than policy, or perceived policy.  More educated people are more likely to be concerned about standards of "presidential" behavior--less educated people may see violations of them as harmless or even as refreshing honesty. (See this post for a historical parallel)