“It’s time to take the chains off of businesses…. Unleash the economy,” says a Republican organizer in Ohio who supports Trump. “I think he is intelligent, I think he has our best interests in heart, I think he really does want to do things to make this country great again, but I worry about his…volatility,” explains a retired suburban woman, wavering between whom to support for president. “This country is great because it gives privilege to everybody, equal rights to everybody,” argues a former leader of a Muslim mosque, likely to support Clinton.
These are a few of the voices of the American voter presented by Farai Chideya at her recent conversation with political science professor Eitan Hersh at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS). Chideya, a journalist and blogger for FiveThirtyEight and a Poynter Fellow in Journalism, spoke on the topic “How can you vote for that candidate? Understanding America’s voters.” Her discussion sought to offer a glimpse into the diverse thinking Americans use in choosing whom to support for president. To do so, Chideya offered a compelling interweave of personal stories and quotes, demographics and polling data, and a series of observations on the telling differences between this year’s presidential election and those since her first coverage in 1996.
Take for an example one of the first questions posed in the conversation. Who is voting for Trump? Professor Hersh suggests three possible categories: “blind partisanship, economic anxiety, and racial resentment.” Chideya decides a fourth category is necessary to represent white, evangelical Christians. Citing personal interviews, Chideya describes their voting impetus as most often the issue of the Supreme Court. Many white evangelicals see the presidential election as likely to define the leaning of the court for the next few decades. She adds this voting block statistically backs Trump, although his support with women of the group has eroded with the recent hot microphone recordings. At the same time, she notes that the average Trump supporter makes more money than the average American but is less educated, such as in the case of many trade or industrial workers. From these four groups of Trump voters, Chideya suggests two “meta-narratives.” First, America can be perceived as a time and not a place. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 72% of likely Trump supporters believe America was better in the 50s. Second, many Americans could be considered worried about status, particularly relative status. In the current election the dialogue has moved further from a discussion of absolute gain and cooperation to a message of comparative advantage and political competition.
This becomes Chideya’s model, tracing from individual interviews and statistical evidence to overarching themes or analysis and back again to tackle questions such as racial politics, persuadable voters, minority groups, un-enthusiasm in the Democratic Party, gerrymandering, and always the question of what makes this election distinct. The voices she presents, often played on recordings during her talk, offer the voters’ positions up for critical commentary while inviting a kind of empathy for the different viewpoints.
The symbol for FiveThirtyEight is the fox from the Greek quote “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” To understand a political election, there cannot be a single defining answer. Farai Chideya brings this way of thinking to the forefront as she investigates the mindset of the American voter. For more of her recent work on this subject, see her series The Voters, published on FiveThirtyEight.