Mehdi Hasan, writing for The Intercept, is on the case of the zombie narrative of the 2016 presidential election:
Time to Kill the Zombie Argument: Another Study Shows Trump Won Because of Racial Anxieties — Not Economic Distress
DO YOU REMEMBER “economic anxiety”? The catch-all phrase relied on by politicians and pundits to try and explain the seemingly inexplicable: the election of Donald J. Trump in November 2016? A term deployed by left and right alike to try and account for the fact that white, working-class Americans voted for a Republican billionaire by an astonishing 2-to-1 margin?
The thesis is as follows: Working-class voters, especially in key “Rust Belt” swing states, rose up in opposition to the party in the White House to punish them for the outsourcing of their jobs and stagnation of their wages. These “left behind” voters threw their weight behind a populist “blue-collar billionaire” who railed against free trade and globalization.
The only problem with the narrative? It’s fiction:
To be clear: “Economic anxiety” has been shot down repeatedly by the experts over the past 18 months. Four damning studies, in particular, stand out from the rest. The first appeared in May 2017, a month after I wrote my original piece, when The Atlantic magazine and Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, published the results of a joint analysis of post-election survey data. Did poor, white, working-class voters back Trump in their droves? Was it the economy, stupid?
Nope. The PRRI analysis of more than 3,000 voters, summarized The Atlantic’s Emma Green, “suggests financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump.” Got that? Hillary Clinton over Trump. Meanwhile, partisan affiliation aside, “it was cultural anxiety — feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment — that best predicted support for Trump.”
In fact, according to the survey data, white, working-class voters who expressed fears of “cultural displacement” were three-and-a-half timesmore likely to vote for Trump than those who didn’t share these fears.
Surprise!
But, of course, the debunking didn’t stop there:
Second, in January 2018, a study by three Amherst political scientists — Brian F. Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta — asked: “What caused whites without college degrees to provide substantially more support to Donald Trump than whites with college degrees?” Here’s their answer, based on survey data from 5,500 American adults:
We find that racism and sexism attitudes were strongly associated with vote choice in 2016, even after accounting for partisanship, ideology, and other standard factors. These factors were more important in 2016 than in 2012, suggesting that the explicitly racial and gendered rhetoric of the 2016 campaign served to activate these attitudes in the minds of many voters. Indeed, attitudes toward racism and sexism account for about two-thirds of the education gap in vote choices in 2016.
Racism and sexism. Who’d have guessed?
What about those economic factors?
Third, in April 2018, Stanford University political scientist Diana Mutz published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that observed how “living in an area with a high median income positively predicted Republican vote choice to a greater extent in 2016,” which is “precisely the opposite of what one would expect based on the left behind thesis.” Mutz found no evidence that a decline in income, or a worsening “personal financial situation,” drove working-class voters into the welcoming arms of a billionaire property mogul. Nor did a decline in manufacturing or employment in the area where Trump voters lived.
And yet we still hear about how Democrats ‘lost voters’, and ‘failed to reach out to the working class’, which of course suggests we should shape our message and target these groups to address these economic concerns, right?
Well, maybe not...
… the latest zombie-killing study was published last week by the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group and co-authored by George Washington University political scientist John Sides (both the Democracy Fund and First Look Media, the Intercept’s parent company, were created by Pierre Omidyar). The VSG report concluded that the “prevailing narrative” of the 2016 election, focused heavily “on the economic concerns of Americans,” and especially “the white working class,” is “flawed” and “misplaced.”
It’s not simply a matter that the zombie narrative has been repeatedly shown to be conclusively false. It relies on false assumptions about the role of white identity in the political decision making of voters, as described in by Ezra Klein in Vox:
Ashley Jardina is a political scientist at Duke University who studies racial identity. In her 2014 dissertation The Demise of Dominance: Group Threat and the New Relevance of White Identity for American Politics, she argues that generations of scholars have taken African-American and Hispanic and Asian identity seriously but assumed there was no such thing as white identity. The conventional wisdom was that “because of their numerical majority and political dominance, whites do not, by and large, possess their own sense of racial identification, and they do not feel consciously compelled to protect some sense of group interest.”
Jardina argued — and, in a series of experiments, proved — that this was wrong. White political identity is “conditional.” It emerges in some periods and is absent in others. The periods it emerges in are periods like this one.
“When the dominant status of whites relative to racial and ethnic minorities is secure and unchallenged, white identity likely remains dormant,” she writes. “When whites perceive their group’s dominant status is threatened or their group is unfairly disadvantaged, however, their racial identity may become salient and politically relevant.”…
There is an explanation we prefer for all this; an explanation that accounts for the turmoil of our politics without forcing us into uncomfortable conversations about race, power, and resentment. That explanation? It’s the economy, stupid.
As the argument goes, the financial crisis, the rise of automation, the wreckage of globalization, the pain of the Great Recession, the shocking rise in inequality — all of that was more than enough to upend our politics; you don’t need to reach for racialized explanations. So a bitter debate has erupted since the 2016 election between those who blame our politics on economic anxiety and those who see a country riven by racial resentment. In its aftermath, a popular synthesis has emerged: Economic anxiety activated racial resentment, which means, comfortingly, that a better economy would calm our divisions.
The best evidence we have suggests this gets the relationship largely backward. In their forthcoming book Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America, political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck analyze reams of data and show that racial resentment activated economic anxiety, rather than the other way around…
“In the post-civil rights era, Democrats needed to maintain their nonwhite base without alienating white voters,” he said. “So their incentive was silence. And Republicans needed to win over white voters without appearing racist. So their incentive was to speak about race in code. The shifts now have made it so Democrats’ incentive is to make explicitly pro-racial equality appeals and Republicans now have an incentive to make more explicit anti-minority appeals.”
Take that idea and extend it out into the coming decades of American politics. The Democratic Party will not be able to win elections without an excited, diverse coalition. The Republican Party will not be able to win elections without an enthused white base. Democrats will need to build a platform that’s even more explicit in its pursuit of racial and gender equality, while Republicans will need to design a politics even more responsive to a coalition that feels itself losing power.
This dynamic is behind much of the frustration about “identity politics.” When a single group dominates the political agenda, their grievances and demands are just coded as politics, and the vast majority of policy is designed in response to their concerns. But that changes when no one group can control the agenda but many groups can push items onto it; then the competition between identity-based groups becomes visible. And it becomes particularly visible to the group that’s traditionally dominated the agenda and believes that their issues reflect what politics is supposed to be about and other groups’ concerns represent special pleading….
The world is not zero-sum, but it is sometimes zero-sum. A world in which 50 percent of government appointees are female is a world in which fewer are male. Those losses will be felt, and fought. Powerful social movements will arise to protect what is being taken, to justify the way things were before. The quickest path toward social calm would be to leave these inequities untouched, but even if that were desirable — and it’s not — it will be impossible as historically marginalized groups gain the power to demand their share of the American dream.
So why would something so consistently shown to be utterly false keep entering political discourse about what Democrats ‘should’ do to win over voters?
As Hasan notes:
The problem, however, with trying to repeatedly rebut all this talk of “economic anxiety” is that it’s a zombie argument. As Paul Krugman has observed, these are arguments “that have been proved wrong, should be dead, but keep shambling along because they serve a political purpose.”
If it were simply mistaken analysis leading to harmless, false conclusions, we could abide the zombie narrative. But it’s not harmless. In fact, perpetuation of the zombie narrative harms Democratic electoral chances (again, from the Hasan article):
So why does this still matter, in 2018? For a start, as Mutz points out, “Trump’s victory may be viewed more admirably when it is attributed to a groundswell of support from previously ignored workers than when it is attributed to those whose status is threatened by minorities and foreign countries.” Plus, she adds, “elected officials who embrace the left behind narrative may feel compelled to pursue policies that will do little to assuage the fears of less educated Americans.”
This is the key point to consider for those on the left who have foolishly, if perhaps with the best of intentions, embraced the “left behind” thesis. (emphasis added)
What happens to efforts to bring the Democratic base (women, especially women of color, who are overwhelmingly the most reliable Democratic voters) to the polls, when Democrats push the ‘left-behind/economic anxiety’ zombie narrative? Nothing good:
Democrats are losing their most loyal voters: black women.
At a moment when so much attention is focused on how Democrats can win white working class voters who backed President Donald Trump, new data shows support for the party is slipping among its most reliable voters—94 percent of whom supported Hillary Clinton last year. (Older black women in particular constitute the party’s electoral base.) According to a Black Women’s Roundtable/ESSENCE poll released on Wednesday, “The majority of Black women continue to believe in the Democratic Party, although the support dropped significantly in a year. In the 2016 survey, Black women overwhelmingly (85%) felt the Democratic Party best represented their interest.” That number fell to 74 percent this year.
What should have been clear on November 9, 2016, and what is the more urgently necessary to understand today, is that the zombie narrative directs resources to try and win over people who are, by and large, the GOP base (and always have been), and undermining what has been shown repeatedly in the past year and a half to actually win elections for Democrats: focus on bringing out the base.