Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism

Abstract

THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN FEATURED major-party candidates who both explicitly put issues of race and gender at the forefront of the discourse. Notably, 2016 also witnessed the largest gap between the presidential vote preferences of college-educated and non-college-educated whites since 1980. While Donald Trump enjoyed just a four-point margin over Hillary Clinton among whites with a college degree (10 points less than Mitt Romney’s margin over Barack Obama among that group in 2012), his advantage among non-college-educated whites was nearly 40 points.1 This gap between college-educated and non-college-educated whites was possibly the single most important divide documented in 2016, and it was the culmination of an increasing divide in party identification among college-educated and non-college-educated whites following Obama’s election in 2008.2 While many election postmortems were quick to make note of the education gap among whites in terms of presidential vote choice in 2016, explanations for the origins of this gap were a subject of significant debate. Two primary explanations have been offered. The first is that white working-class Americans were left behind during the economic recovery that took place during the Obama presidency, and Trump’s populist economic message, focusing on protectionism and other policies to help working people, resonated with this feeling.3 A second explanation is that Trump’s willingness to make explicitly racist and sexist appeals during the campaign, coupled with the presence of an African American president and the first major-party female nominee, made racism and sexism a dividing line in the vote in this election.4 This led less educated whites, who tend to exhibit higher levels of sexism and racism, to support Trump, while more educated whites were more supportive of Clinton.5