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What if Trump’s Nativism Actually Hurts Him?
Howard Lavine and
Mr. Lavine and Ms. Rahn are political scientists at the University of Minnesota.
President Trump’s short-lived family separation policy extended the hard line on immigration he promoted during his presidential campaign. Many analysts believe that this strategy helped him win the election by politicizing latent nativist sentiment among white Americans. At his rallies, Mr. Trump consistently propounded a view of immigrants as criminals and miscreants, not to mention a cause of unemployment and wage stagnation among native-born citizens. As president, he has continued to use dehumanizing language in reference to immigrants, words like “vermin,” “infest” and “animals.” On Sunday, he dared Democrats to push for the abolition of the Immigration, Customs and Enforcement agency, claiming that if they pursued the idea, they would “never win another election.”
But is it true that immigration is always a losing issue for Democrats? There is a consensus among scholars and commentators that an individual’s view on immigration had a bigger impact on how he or she voted in 2016, compared with recent elections. Given that white Americans tend to be substantially more anti-immigration than pro-immigration, one might expect that highlighting a hard-line stand on the issue would have benefited Mr. Trump in the election.
Contrary to received wisdom, however, the immigration issue did not play to Mr. Trump’s advantage nearly as much as commonly believed. According to our analysis of national survey data from the American National Election Studies (a large, representative sample of the population of the United States), Hillary Clinton did better in the election than she would have if immigration had not been so prominent an issue. In fact, a liberal backlash seems to have contributed to Mrs. Clinton’s victory in the popular vote count.
To determine how immigration shaped electoral fortunes, we examined the link between voters’ views on immigration and whether they voted Democratic or Republican in 2016. We then compared the strength of that link with recent elections in which immigration was less visible as a national campaign issue. We estimated whether voters supported the Democratic or Republican candidate on the basis of their preferred level of immigration — “increase,” “keep the same,” “decrease” — taking into account the voter’s party identification, ideology, gender, age and level of education.
We found that Mr. Trump did only slightly better than his Republican predecessors among anti-immigration whites. Among pro-immigration whites, however, Mrs. Clinton far outpaced John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. For example, Mr. Obama received the votes of 50 percent of pro-immigration whites in 2012, whereas Mrs. Clinton won the votes of 72 percent of that group in 2016 — a 22-point difference.
Among anti-immigration whites, by contrast, Mr. Trump improved only marginally on Mitt Romney’s showing, 79 percent to 71 percent. Perhaps most important — given the popularity of the “keep the same” position — is that immigration moderates swung 7 percentage points in Mrs. Clinton’s favor (Mr. Obama received 38 percent to Mrs. Clinton’s 45). The 2016 comparisons with 2008 and 2004 are highly similar.
We can’t know whether this asymmetry across elections is a function of Mr. Trump’s nativism, Mrs. Clinton’s inclusive pronouncements about immigration or both. What we can say is that after Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton repeatedly clashed over the issue during the course of the campaign, Mr. Trump’s electoral gain — relative to the percentages Mr. Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush received on the issue — paled against Mrs. Clinton’s gains over Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama.
What about turnout, though? Did the salience of immigration in 2016 drive more Trump supporters than Clinton supporters to the polls? In short, no. We found no evidence that pro-immigration whites were less — or more — likely than anti-immigration whites to cast ballots in 2016.
What does our analysis say more generally about the efficacy of politicizing xenophobia and racism in American elections? First, by instigating a liberal counterreaction, it seems possible that highlighting immigration may no longer be an effective political strategy for the Republican Party. This may be the case for two related reasons.
First, xenophobic whites have long been reliable Republican voters, whereas less intolerant whites have tended to waver in their presidential voting. Democrats may therefore have more to gain than Republicans by continued political conflict over immigration.
Second, 2016 marked a key change in rhetorical strategy among Republican presidential candidates. From 1968, when Richard Nixon first exploited his “Southern strategy” to attract resentful whites through code words like “law and order” and “states’ rights,” to 2012, when Mr. Romney ran ads claiming that Mr. Obama wanted to allow welfare recipients to collect paychecks without having to look for work, messages like this were conveyed implicitly, in what have come to be called “dog whistles,” with plausible deniability that they had anything to do with race.
In 2016 (and 2017 and 2018), Mr. Trump dispensed with dog whistles in favor of a more explicit strategy of cultural confrontation, which prompted — and may continue to prompt — a more powerful liberal counterreaction.
For these reasons, we think that Mr. Trump’s explicit appeals to intolerance are likely to help Democrats more than Republicans. If we’re right, there will be less incentive for future Republicans to contest elections by instigating group division. Perhaps then partisan competition may return to one of its core concerns: how much the government should intervene in the economy and what the proper size of the safety net is. As polls consistently show, voters care more about these economic questions than they do about cultural politics.
Howard Lavine and Wendy Rahn are political scientists at the University of Minnesota.
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