The best way to predict support for Trump

Editor’s Note: Jonathan Weiler is director of undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-author of ” Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics.” The views expressed are his own.

Donald Trump’s victory in the winner-takes-all Arizona primary Tuesday night makes it even more likely that he will be the eventual Republican nominee for president of the United States. It’s a political ascent that continues to shock and unnerve the political establishment.

Yet for many, his base of support remains a mystery. Trump, after all, is not your typical contemporary Republican conservative. He opposes trade deals that he says have hurt working Americans. He lambasts President George W. Bush for his feckless and disastrous invasion of Iraq. Targeting an even more sacred cow, he points out that it was on Bush’s watch that thousands of Americans were murdered on 9/11. And bizarrely for a GOP aspirant to the highest office, Trump has praised Planned Parenthood – an organization anathema to most conservatives – for having provided health services to millions of women (though he does believe it should be denied federal funding because it houses abortion services).

Trump’s idiosyncrasies have prompted many conservatives to insist he’s not one of them. And yet, he has won a clear majority of the Republican primary contests, many in overwhelming fashion, in virtually every geographical region of the country. Why? There are numerous reasons to be sure. But one central source of strength for Trump is authoritarian-minded voters.

The pattern has become clear in several recent surveys, including a national survey and a separate survey of South Carolina Republicans, conducted by Matthew MacWilliams, and a national poll by Morning Consult in conjunction with VOX.

According to these polls, the single best predictor of support for Trump lay in how respondents answered four questions about parenting. Specifically, individuals who believed that raising kids to be well-behaved, obedient, respectful of elders and well-mannered were likely Trump voters. And those who prioritized the importance of independence, curiosity, thinking for oneself and considerateness were not.

What does raising children have to do with Trump? It turns out that these parenting questions aren’t really about how individuals might raise their own children. Instead, they reflect individuals’ preferred views of social order and of who’s in charge. In other words, they prefer authoritarianism, a way of seeing the world that prioritizes traditionally defined notions of order. They tend to be very suspicious of so-called outsiders and prioritize simple, clear solutions to complex problems. In particular, authoritarian-minded individuals prefer force and clarity over nuance and what they perceive to be counterproductive hand-wringing.

How did we get here? As Marc Hetherington and I explained in our 2009 book, “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics,” one of the key dynamics underlying the growing political chasm in the United States over the past generation has been the sorting of people with very different worldviews into the two major political camps in America.

Whereas a generation ago the two major political parties were roughly equally likely to attract authoritarian-minded voters, that is no longer the case. Authoritarian-minded voters have, by and large, gravitated toward the Republican Party in recent years. Conversely, less authoritarian-inclined voters have left the GOP for the Democratic Party. Those trends have only intensified since then, particularly in the age of Barack Obama.

This development is the product in significant part because of a decades-long shift in party appeals. Beginning in the late 1960s, Republican elites, in an effort to break up the dominant New Deal coalition that had favored Democrats for a generation, began to craft appeals to swathes of white voters anchored in tough-on-crime, law-and-order messages and opposition to welfare. Over time, Republican elites also emphasized traditional family values, accompanied by a shift from support to opposition over the Equal Rights Amendment and eventually to resistance to gay rights and, throughout the past generation, a “tough” approach to dealing with foreign policy challenges.

All of these appeals, wittingly or not, began to attract certain kinds of voters to the Republican Party – those with an authoritarian worldview. By contrast, as Democrats increasingly emphasized the importance of diversity and inclusion, their appeals became more attractive to less authoritarian-minded voters. These ever more divergent appeals, coupled with profound changes in America’s demographic landscape, has seeded a bitterly acrimonious political divide characterized by fundamental and irreconcilable differences in worldview between the average Republican and the average Democrat.

This terrain has proved fertile ground for the growth of Trumpism, although it is important to note that not all Republicans share the worldview described here. And there are still plenty of Democrats who do (likely including many of the individuals who have crossed over to vote for Trump in the primaries so far).

In this telling, Trump is, in important respects, not a traditional conservative, at least as normally understood in American political parlance. And while his base of support does derive from the kinds of voters who have increasingly found a home in the Republican Party in recent years, it’s clear that Trump’s base does not overlap completely with the GOP.

Ultimately, there are plenty of disaffected voters out there – outside the traditional confines of the two-party system – who find Trump’s “us vs. them” approach, his simple, clear language and his unapologetic attacks on so-called outsiders to be music to their ears.

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