Polls show white voting bloc backed Trump
Similar to U.K.’s Brexit vote, racist sentiments helped sweep outsider to victory
A white voter movement came out and staged its own version of Brexit on Tuesday by supporting U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his xenophobic, anti-free-trade ways, polling data show.
It wasn’t just the white, disaffected male and female voter without a college degree who voted for Trump. So did the white middle class of both sexes and the wealthy, according to U.S. election exit data compiled by CNN-based on 24,537 people leaving 350 voting stations.
White voters made up 70 per cent of the total election votes. Of the white support, 58 per cent voted for Trump while 37 per cent went for Hillary Clinton, the data show.
African-Americans made up 12 per cent of the vote and of those 88 per cent supported Clinton and 8 per cent Trump. Of Latin American voters, which made up 11 per cent of the vote — 65 per cent voted Clinton and 29 per cent went Trump.
White, non-college-educated support for Trump was expected and so was the support for him among wealthier whites, said Melissa Williams, a University of Toronto political science professor.
“But the base, the core of the support is of white, middle-income people of both sexes. The extent of which women in that cohort ended up supporting Trump is a bit surprising,” said Williams, who is spending this year as a senior democracy fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Among white men, 63 per cent went for Trump while 31 per cent voted for Clinton. Among the women, 53 per cent went Trump and only 43 per cent voted Clinton.
“It clearly is a white voting bloc. The demographic profile of Trump supporters is very similar to that of Brexit supporters,” Williams said.
“When the working class is angry, facing a bleak future, it is very easy for elites to mobilize racist sentiments, find a racialized scapegoat and turn that anger away from elites and towards a racialized scapegoat. That is the dynamic we saw in the Brexit and Trump campaigns,” Williams said.
Brexit is the term used to describe the British voters’ decision to leave the European Union. The man who helped lead Britain out of the EU, Nigel Farage, the interim United Kingdom Independence Party Leader, said Trump’s victory is part of this populist wave, currently upturning establishments. “Brexit was the first brick that was knocked out of the establishment wall. A lot more were knocked out last night,” Farage told Time magazine on Wednesday.
This truly is a transnational phenomenon, agreed Williams.
“We have been witnessing the rise of right-wing, populist — I call them white-wing populist — movements across advanced democracies. There is something structural going on here that is common to the U.S. and many European countries, including the U.K.,” she said.
Growing wealth inequality, the growth of the 1 per cent top income earners against the 99 per cent, played a role and Clinton did not appeal to those young, millennial voters who supported Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders.
“They trusted Bernie because he has been hammering inequality forever. He was credible,” said Williams, adding Clinton never achieved Sanders’ popularity with youth.
Trump was not the perfect candidate, but his voters accepted that early on and he had the perfect message for his base, agreed Connor Whitworth, a consultant at Navigator. That was a message of fear, anti-immigration, of calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals and of building walls between America and Mexico.
“Voters made up their mind about Trump early on. Yes he was sexist and said terrible things. If they were voting based on what he was going to do for America,” Whitworth said.
Trump supporters railed against globalization. His coalition was formed from a vacuum of deep divisions. Out of this came rural white voters who came out like never be- fore,” Whitworth said. Trump also won in Pennsylvania and Michigan, rust-belt states that he wasn’t expected to win. “Not since 1988 has a Republican won Pennsylvania and Michigan. These are white rural voters. It is not white voters but white rural voters who felt absolutely ignored by Washington,” he said.
Meanwhile, perhaps Clinton’s soft supporters believed the media reports that she was going to win the election and stayed home, neglecting to vote, he added. Clinton, however, did win 94 per cent of the black, female vote.
Even though Clinton won the popular vote, she still did not gain a majority of the 538 Electoral College votes she needed to become president.
“The demographic profile of Trump supporters is very similar to that of Brexit supporters.” MELISSA WILLIAMS POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO