Grievance Propels White Male Trump Voters
This article was originally published on Daily Kos.
By Alan Singer
This post is a based on a presentation I made at the Hofstra University Fall 2024 Symposium on “The Role of Social Identities in American Politics.” I was on a panel discussing “White Male Identity in the Political Landscape.”
I don’t study whiteness or male identify and I don’t think many white men would see me as representative of their group. I voted for Barack Obama and I plan to vote for Kamala Harris. I think Donald Trump is a dangerous autocrat who is suffering from age related intellectual slowing and I don’t see how people with concern for the future of the country and the planet could vote for him.
My research as a historian has focused on New York’s role in the American slave system and the struggle to overthrow it, especially the role of African Americans, and transformational consciousness, among workers, teachers, and students. I reject the fields of whiteness studies and male gender studies because they place white men at the center, which is something scholars have been trying move away from. I also don’t like white maleness as an umbrella category. The reasons white billionaires like Elon Musk, Timothy Mellon, David Sacks, Stephan Schwarzman, Bill Ackman, Woody Johnson, and Paul Theil, are endorsing Trump is to gain increased economic advantage because they don’t believe they are wealthy enough and want to avoid taxs and government regulation. It is very different from the white men and women in MAGA hats cheering at Trump rallies like it was a sporting event.
I recently published a book on class-conscious Central Pennsylvania Coal miners with SUNY Press. Between World War I and the end of World War II, Pennsylvania bituminous coal miners near Johnstown and Pittsburgh were amongst the most militant unionized workers in the United States. They were almost all white and since women were not permitted to work in the coal mines in the United States, they were all male. One of the things I found was that with the loss of union and work as a source of identity, their consciousness shifted. In the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections, communities that previously supported a militant working-class movement were major sources of support for Donald Trump’s Presidential campaigns.
Commentators across the political spectrum have offered explanations for Donald Trump’s election as President in 2016 and continued support from his political base. White working-class voters, particularly voters without a college degree, and especially white men from rural areas, turned against traditional Republican candidates and a Democratic Party they once supported because they felt abandoned by changes sweeping through the country and especially in their communities. The death of the bituminous coal mining industry meant the virtual death of Pennsylvania mining towns. Class consciousness based on work, union, and community that had once sustained radical resistance to coal operators dissolved with the diminution of these institutions over the course of decades leaving ethnic identification and anger producing a swing to a very different kind of political behavior. Their grievances made them susceptible to Trump’s racist and ethno-nationalist appeals. But I believe economic transformation rather than whiteness and maleness better explains their voting behavior.
National figures on white male voting patterns are misleading. According to Pew Research Center polls, in the 2016 presidential election, white voters overall preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton by a 21-point margin (58% to 37%). 63% of white men voted for Trump and 72% of white men without a college degree. White men with a college degree were more divided, 54% voting for Trump and 39% for Clinton.
In the 2020 presidential election, white men voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden, but by a smaller margin than in 2016. Trump won white men by 17 points (57% to 40%), a decrease from the 30-point margin in 2016. Trump secured 59% the votes of white male voters without a college degree, down from 72%. Trump received 84% of the votes from working-class white evangelicals.
According to recent polls, a majority of white male voters still prefer Trump, but the gap is much less. About 63% of white voters without a college degree support Trump and only 34% support Harris. Overall. 52% of white men support Trump, while 46% support Harris.
But the results were significantly different in New York State in 2020. 63% of college educated white men in New York State voted for Joe Biden, and overall, only 45% of white men vioted from Donald Trump.
White men who vote for a clearly diminished Donald Trump, who vote against Kamala Harris, act for a number of reasons, including racism, gender bias, antisemitism, religious fundamentalism, homo and transphobia, and for wealthy white men, perceived financial benefit. For ordinary white men, not the wealthy, I think their voting pattern reflects an underlying sense of displacement from what they have idealized as a better past when men were really men, Trump men, something that probably never existed for most of them, but something they deeply want. I think the key to Trump’s appeal is grievance. He is also using grievance as a way to attract Black and Latino male voters, one reason the 2024 Presidential race projects to be very close.
I find Trump’s resilience in the 2024 President race frightening. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard University recently published Tyranny of the Minority (Crown, 2024) where they argued the Republican Party has been able to use undemocratic features of the Constitution to seriously threaten the survival of democracy in the United States. Part of that campaign has been to racial politics. Republican voters buy into ideas promoted by Republican politicians that the major problems in the United States are an invasion by non-white undocumented immigrants from the South, the disappearance of the “traditional American way of life,” and the Great Replacement, a plot by Democrats, urban elites, and Jews to replace the true Christian white Americans with a polyglot from around the world that they will control. A majority of Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen and that it will be okay to use force to reestablish their version of America.
Alan Singer is a historian and teacher educator at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York. His most recent books are Social Studies for Secondary Schools, 5th edition (Routledge, 2024) and Class-Conscious Coal Miners (SUNY Press, 2024). Blogs, tweets, essays, interviews, and e-blasts present his views and not those of Hofstra University.