One of the toughest things about being a white male in America is that, even though you have been born into a time and age when your skin color gives you a leg up (in comparison to the many people who do not have that skin color), like everyone else, you are probably not going to be rich. Frankly, unless you are born with a father willing to give you a meager $1 million loan to start out in the world, you’re going to be living paycheck to paycheck. If you have bought into the belief that an unregulated free market is a fair thing and that people just need bootstraps and gumption to get ahead, your failure to get ahead cannot be your fault. White men have the sneaking suspicion that they have only themselves to blame for their miserable circumstances. Enter Donald Trump for President! Jeff Guo over at the Washington Post has been doing some fun look at the Donald’s voter-base demographics:
It seems that Donald Trump performed the best in places where middle-aged whites are dying the fastest.
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Here are scatter charts to visualize this connection in nine of the 11 Super Tuesday states. Each circle represents a county. The horizontal position of a circle represents the white death rate in that county for people ages 40 to 64. Counties toward the right have higher rates of white mortality.
He gives you this handy set of charts which show that, with the exception of Massachusetts, the great white hope Donald seems to get high performance out of areas where the white mortality rates are higher. Guo tried to control for various factors (i.e. education level, non-white death rate, median income, employment).
Even after controlling for these other factors, the middle-aged white death rate in a county was still a significant predictor of the share of votes that went to Trump.
Here's how to think about it: Say that County A and County B are roughly identical, except for the death rate of their white, middle-aged residents. County A's death rate is in the 75th percentile — meaning that the middle-aged whites there are dying faster than in three quarters of other counties — while County B's is in the 25th percentile. Between these two economically similar places, County A would give an extra percentage point to Donald Trump in the primary.
This is not to say that the single predictable descriptor of a Trump supporter has to do with their mortality rate—but, you get the idea. Also an indicator for Trump support? Not having a bachelor degree, not working, and (related to the latter), being from an area where manufacturing has been on decline—and going to China. Those white people feel like they are going extinct, and in some philosophical ways, they are—but it’s at desperate times like these that people turn to fascists like Trump.