Why White Women Voted for Trump
— and It Was Not Racism or Xenophobia
Analyses of Trump voters often accuse them of racism, misogyny, or simply being overcome with the joy of listening to someone say the things they didn’t dare say themselves.
Almost none of these analyses examine the policies — as opposed to the harsh rhetoric — that Trump proposes and ask whether those voting for him might, just possibly, be voting to advance their rational self-interest.
While, to be sure, Trump has attracted racists and xenophobes, it is a terrible libel against his voters to assume they all fall into this category. After all, Bill Clinton had a credible accusation of rape leveled by Juanita Broaddrick — a friend who saw her shortly after the alleged incident reported that her stockings were torn, her lips were swollen, and she looked very upset — yet commentators do not accuse Clinton voters of tolerating rape. George W. Bush started a war based on what he knew were lies — a CIA official met with him, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice in the Oval Office and told them — yet no one calls Bush voters warmongers and baby killers. (Those people justifiably upset at the approximately 8000 children separated from their families at the border should remember that Bush’s war and the resulting sectarian violence created 800,000 orphans who were permanently separated from their parents.)
Instead, the general assumption is that Bush and Clinton voters were ordinary people who voted their self-interest. In contrast, Trump voters are too often accused of racism, stupidity, xenophobia, or other crimes.
Yet, an examination of Trump’s actual platform, as opposed to his obnoxious rhetoric — shows why, for people in certain sectors of American society — a vote for Trump was a vote for bettering their lives.
What follows is an examination of some of Trump’s key issues and why people might find him an attractive figure .
- Trump campaigns on putting an end to foreign wars and bringing the troops home. While he has not succeeded in doing that, he is the first president in many years to not start a new war. Alas, he has increased bombing levels in the wars he inherited. One might also note that every time he tries to draw down troops in some troubled region of the world, the media howls with indignation.
In fact, there is evidence that antiwar sentiment motivated some voters. Counties that voted for Obama and then Trump had higher than average rates of casualties in the Iraq war (Kriner and Shin). Voters for Tulsi Gabbard, the Democratic candidate for presidency were often men who had voted for Trump in the 2016 general election. At least 6.4 million — and possibly more — people voted for Obama and then Trump nationwide and 12 percent of Bernie Sanders voters later voted for Trump.
It is difficult to accuse people who voted for a woman of color (Gabbard), an African American (Obama) and a Jewish socialist (Sanders) of racism.
What do ALL Four of these candidates — Trump, Obama, Gabbard, and Sanders — have in common? Not economics. Not immigration. Not the environment. Not racism. Not women’s issues. What they all have in common is an opposition to war.
Because the US has a volunteer army, the military is filled with many people who come from economically marginal communities and see enlistment as their ticket to a better future. A volunteer army also means that people in better economic circumstances tend not to join. The result is a huge disconnect between the people who fight our nation’s wars and the rest of American society.
To many members of the American elite, war and its brutal consequences are all but invisible.
The voting trends referenced above point to the fact that many people voted for Trump because they did not want their loved ones to be killed in a war started by hawkish Hillery — or Killery as her opponents call her — or Biden, who seems to lack a coherent view of foreign policy.
Voters who regard racism as more important than war and peace should remember that the current military system has different impacts on different races. Schools with large African American populations are more likely to have Junior Reserve Office Training Corps (JROTC) programs and receive more frequent visits from recruiters. After the start of the Iraq war, George W. Bush signed a decree stating that undocumented immigrants could receive green cards if they enlisted. They result is that Latin Americans serving in the army had a very high death rate because, while they could enlist, they were not eligible for training programs in safer jobs because they lacked US citizenship.
White women — or women of any color — if you voted for Trump because you thought he was less likely to start a war, you need not be ashamed. Voting NOT to get people killed is honorable.
2. NAFTA
Economists disagree among themselves about the effects of NAFTA. A safe generalization is that the trade agreement destroyed some jobs and created others. However, the people being hired for the new jobs were often not the same people who lost the old ones.
Some reputable economists do believe that NAFTA hurt American workers a great deal. I lack the knowledge to evaluate their arguments but the relevant point to this discussion is that working class Trump supporters who believe they were harmed by NAFTA are not unreasonable for believing this to be the case as at least some economists agree with them.
Trump did renegotiate some of these trade deals but the effects remain to be seen.
3. Abortion Opponents
Conservative Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, tend to oppose abortion. Trump was the pro-life candidate in the last two elections and hence won their vote. It is possible to believe that they err on this issue and at the same time believe that voting for Trump because they want to save babies’ lives is not a racist vote.
4. Immigration
Political rhetoric on this topic often goes to unfortunate extremes and it is imperative to call out the demagoguery that too often surrounds this issue. However, there is respectable economic research showing that immigration often hurts the economic prospects of low-wage Americans. George J Borjas, a professor of economics at Harvard University, has found that large-scale immigration does harm Americans doing low-paid jobs. Bernie Sanders has expressed the same doubts about mass immigration and its ability to lower wages of American workers.
There are also indications that African American males are especially harmed by large-scale immigration. When immigrants move in mass to specific communities, economic research shows that wages for African American men drops, participation in the labor force declines, and rates of imprisonment spike.
In dealing with this issue, the answer is not, in my view, building a concrete barrier — who wants the 21st century equivalent of the Berlin Wall on an American border? Rather, it is to reform our immigration system so that we admit immigrants who do not compete with native-born American workers.
At all times, one must call out those who make racists generalizations about immigrants who have the courage to come to a foreign country and work hard at low-paid jobs to give their children better lives.
The take-home message: the elite needs to realize that many Americans are living in a vastly different reality, one in which a vote for Trump advances — or is at least perceived to advance — their legitimate, rational interests.
It is disheartening to see the lack of empathy and attributions of bad faith to voters who too often bear the weight of America’s wars while having their economic interests undercut by elites who benefit from the policies that immiserate their fellow Americans.
Yet, as a lifelong Democrat, I would prefer another candidate to Trump. I cannot help but ask what happened to the political party I joined in 1977, the party whose members opposed the Vietnam war and had the working class as an important part of their base and took their interests seriously. How did so few Democrats mount an opposition to the Iraq war? Why did so many support the draconian 1994 crime bill that imprisoned so many people convicted of non-violent offenses for cruelly long periods of time and not call for its revision once its disastrous consequences became clear — and yes, it was Trump who modified this bill, leading to the release of 3000 federal prison inmates and a sentencing reduction for others. If NAFTA was a good idea, why were there no steps taken to help displaced workers?
Yet, the party nominated candidates — Clinton and Biden — who supported the war and the 1994 crime bill and NAFTA with no thought of the consequences that were borne by low-income people.
I write this in sorrow as a Democrat but my party deserved to lose in 2016. Trump’s victory should have been a wakeup call to the party elite, but instead they preferred to blame Trump voters instead of looking in the mirror.
If the Democratic party wants to avoid another debacle — and even if Biden wins this one, it was in many respects a pyrrhic victory — it must start representing the people of America’s heartland instead of being the pro-corporate party with a gentler face.
