Sociologists find that Trump voters are motivated by racism.
A new study reports the obvious:
“A lot of people find it really hard to believe that people would really want what Trump represents,” said Smith, who began researching authoritarianism as a sociology graduate student more than 40 years ago. “My experience is the hard core of people who support Trump election after election is they really mean it. They support him because of what he says and does, not in spite of it.”
While this wouldn’t be the first time the academic community identified dictatorial red flags in Trump, ascribing them to a significant portion of the U.S. electorate reflects a rarer scholarship. Yet Smith and Hanley don’t shy from the implications in “Authoritarianism From Below: Why and How Donald Trump Follows His Followers,” in which they write that “75% of Trump’s voters supported him enthusiastically, mainly because they shared his prejudices, not because they were hurting economically.”
Smith and Hanley built their assessment around surveys into voter behavior by the American National Election Studies, a multi-university project that has employed lengthy questionnaires and follow-up interviews to understand the motivations and demographics of U.S. voters since 1948.
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Respondents were asked to rate their level of agreement or disagreement to two statements: “Our country would be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the ‘rotten apples’ who are ruining everything” and, “What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil and take us back to our true path.”
Using a statistical method called multiple logistic regression, Smith and Hanley weighed the responses against 17 independent variables to see which ones factored most heavily in the decisions of 1,883 white voters, 979 of whom voted for Trump, 716 who did so enthusiastically. The sociologists discovered that strong support for a domineering leader coincided with a big preference for Trump and big biases against women, immigrants and Black Americans. They also determined that belief mattered much more than demographics.
“If you looked at just demographic variables, then it is true that a higher percentage of people without college degrees were more likely to support Trump,” Smith explained. “But when you also factored in attitude variables, they completely eliminated the statistical significance of the population variables.”
Smith said these indicators were also present in voters who backed Republican Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama in 2012, though to a lesser extent. “The wish for a domineering leader was a very powerful predictor of support for Donald Trump,” he said.
The good news, if you want to call it that:
Smith, who recalled once coming across a poll showing strong support for President Ronald Reagan despite most voters believing he didn’t care about them, believes the U.S. audience for domineering leaders is actually getting smaller if louder. He bases that long view on ANES surveys from the 1950s, which included questions from an early authoritarian scale, his work with Hanley and a nationally representative survey Altemeyer did with Monmouth University in 2019 for his book “Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers.”
The bad?
He said 37% to 41% of U.S. voters were inclined toward authoritarianism a decade ago, but ANES didn’t include the authoritarian measurements in successive surveys. Smith and Hanley have proposed reincorporating them in ANES’ 2026 survey, and have pitched analogue surveys in other countries.
“So far no biters,” Smith said.
It’s not a kitchen table issue so …