A poll released on Thursday from the Public Religion Research Institute showed Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump 47-41 in the presidential race; by itself, that’s not that interesting, since that’s right where polling averages have the race. But one particular finding from their poll got a lot of attention in the media, simply because it’s a question no one has really thought to ask before, but the answer makes a lot of intuitive sense.
White voters who still live in the community in which they were raised are supporting Trump over Clinton by 26 percentage points (57% vs. 31%, respectively). Trump also has an advantage over Clinton among white voters who live within a 2-hour drive from their hometown (50% vs. 41%, respectively). However, among white voters who live farther away from their hometown, Clinton leads Trump (46% vs. 40%, respectively).
(PRRI, like Pew Research, specializes in asking deeper questions than the more mundane media pollsters, who tend to just ask about who people are voting for and their demographic data. For example, their study from November 2015, “Anxiety, Nostalgia, and Mistrust,” introduced a lot of subtlety into the debate over whether the Trump phenomenon was more about “economic anxiety” or racism, revealing that it’s about both, but bound together with a sentimental longing for something that doesn’t exist any more (and may never have existed in the first place).)
Their new finding about mobility … and the correlation between Trump support among people who are rooted in place vs. Clinton support among people who get up and move … goes a long way toward explaining the new map that we’re seeing in 2016 (which isn’t that new, really, but it’s a further evolution of trends we’ve been seeing since the 1990s). The Republicans are increasingly becoming the party of rural and exurban voters, and, relatedly, people who tend to be aggrieved about getting the short end of the stick in an increasingly globalized, knowledge-based economy. The Democrats are increasingly the party of urban and suburban voters, in other words, people who are likelier to be prospering in an economy that’s increasingly spiky and where the upward spikes are likelier to be in major metropolitan areas.
The question of mobility isn’t a clear-cut one, in terms of seeing causality or even correlation. As PRRI points out, mobility is strongly related to education. They found that 35 percent of Americans live in the town where they were born, 27 percent live within a two-hour drive of their hometown, and 37 percent live more than two hours away. But among those who live in their hometown, 53 percent have a high school education or less, while only 29 percent of those living two hours away or more have only a high school education or less.
So, it’s a chicken-and-egg question: does education make it likelier that you’ll move away? (In other words, to get a job that utilizes the college education that you received, you're probably going to need to move to a major metro area, instead of staying somewhere where the economy is dominated by manufacturing, agriculture, or just the service industry.) Or are the restless, curious people who are likelier to move away also the ones who are likelier to get educated? (And you have to consider that moving somewhere else to go to college is that important first step in getting out of town and severing old ties.)
But there’s an even deeper undercurrent in the election, that Josh Barro tried to get at last month, but is especially relevant in the wake of this PRRI data: a lot of what’s going on is simply about optimism vs. pessimism (and how those abstract qualities can get geographically concentrated), as well as openness vs. intolerance.
Donald Trump is underperforming the typical Republican candidate in states that are magnets for migration — places like North Carolina, Colorado, Georgia, and Texas.
He's doing unusually well in states where net migration is low or even negative, such as Iowa, Maine, and Michigan.
Barro pointed out that you can see this in particular if you zoom in on neighboring states where there’s a lot of migration in one vs. little migration in the other (New Hampshire and Maine, in this year’s case), or at different demographics within a state (such as North Carolina, where there’s been a lot of migration to the Charlotte and Raleigh/Durham areas, and the recent NYT/Siena poll showed a big polling gap between voters born in the state vs. those born out of the state).
If you delve a little deeper into Census data, you can see that relationship. The Census doesn’t ask whether you live more than two hours from home, but it does ask whether you live in the same state you were born in. Here are the percentages of people born in a different state than where they now live, for selected swing states:
Nevada 53.1
New Hampshire 50.8
Arizona 45.9
Colorado 45.9
Florida 40.3
Virginia 36.5
Georgia 33.8
North Carolina 33.8
Maine 31.6
Missouri 29.1
Iowa 23.6
Wisconsin 23.0
Ohio 19.6
Pennsylvania 18.9
Michigan 16.1
Hopefully you’re seeing the pattern … the states where Clinton is overperforming (Colorado, Virginia) are among the ones with a higher level of movers. The ones where she’s underperforming relative to usual Democrat performance (Iowa, Ohio) are some of the ones with the most people staying in place. The two real deviations seem to be Nevada (where she isn’t faring as well, thanks to low levels of college-educated whites) and Pennsylvania (where she is doing well, probably because there’s enough diversity and education in the Philadelphia area to overcome the high levels of aging-in-place you see throughout the rest of the state).
As Barro’s article discusses, though, there’s more to this than just education or other easily described demographic categories. There are potentially different mindsets at work between those who move and those who don’t: he argues that moving is a sign of openness to change, and also agency over one’s own life, actively seeking out new opportunities and experiences, instead of just sitting in place and brooding over who else to blame for one’s lot in life.
And you can see that in the whole frameworks that the two presidential campaigns operate in, not just in terms of policy but also rhetoric (or “branding,” if you prefer). One is about inclusion and looking forward; the other is a dark, dour campaign about fear of the outsiders showing up and resentment about having gotten left behind as the broader culture changes.