The Trump Vote: Education or Religion?
1. College and the Evangelical Vote
It has long been noted that Trump, who said, “I love the poorly educated,” has a strong appeal among Whites without a college degree. We can see the voting breakdown in the figure below. Each box represents a demographic group. Box width shows the size of the group and box height shows their vote for Trump in the presidential election. Non-Whites (boxes with black outlines), regardless of their education level, gave only about 25% support in both elections, far less than Whites (boxes with red outlines). The educational divide among Whites is clear in the figure. About 50% of Whites with a college degree (green shading) voted for Trump, compared to almost 70% of Whites without a degree (blue shading).
University of Pennsylvania sociologist John J. DiLilo, Jr., further breaks down the White vote in terms of both education and religion. He divides the White electorate between “Evangelical” and “Non-Evangelical” voters. Using his data, let’s look at the vote in terms of these religious categories and education level. These charts (see below) put the race/religion divide into a different light.
In 2016, among non-Evangelical voters, there was almost no difference in the Trump percentage between those with or without a college degree. Same goes for Evangelical voters. In other words, within each religious category, education did not make a difference.
How can this be true if other data shows that education level made a big difference? It is because the fraction of people getting a degree is very different in the two religious groups. Those with a degree include a lot of non-Evangelicals (over 35% of all White voters) and far fewer Evangelicals (about 10% of all White voters). Thus the degree group is more heavily weighted with non-Evangelicals. The no-degree group has a similar number of both religious groups, thus weighting the Evangelicals more than in the college degree group.
The larger fraction of Evangelicals shift the no-degree group more heavily to Trump. Maybe it is not that higher education makes people less likely to vote for Trump; it is just that evangelical Christians are more likely to vote for Trump and they make up a bigger fraction of the population without a degree.
The statistics for 2020 are more complicated. Both Evangelicals and non-Evangelicals showed a similar evolution from 2016: college graduates voted less for Trump than before, and non-graduates voted more for Trump.
2. Economics & Education
Education is closely linked to class and income. Sometimes a college degree is considered the divide between working class and middle class, though many people who did not graduate college earn high incomes and consider themselves middle class and many college graduates do not. The economic argument for Trump’s appeal is that he addressed concerns of the working class. Wages and job security for the working class have been depressed by cheap imports and probably by immigration. Therefore one theory is that Trump has gained working class support because of his hostility to immigration and imports.
The 2016 voting data does not support this theory, since economic issues should be at least as motivating for non-Evangelicals as for Evangelicals. The 2020 election shows more of a divide between college graduates and non-graduates, but Trump was not any more anti-immigrant or anti-trade than he had been in 2020.
It is not clear the white working class vote for Trump was even very unusual. Two political scientists looked at working class voters, who they defined as people without a college degree and with incomes below the US median. Trump won 59% of their vote in 2020 and 62% in 2016. But in 2012, 57% voted for Mitt Romney, not exactly anyone’s idea of a populist politician. Votes by this group for both Bushes and Reagan were somewhat lower, generally in the low 50s.
It is easy to believe that Trump appealed more to less educated voters because he speaks at a very low grade level in an extremely informal style, using short sentences, a limited vocabulary, frequent repetition, and a stream-of-consciousness riffing that often makes more sense when watched then when read. His talking points emphasize emotional content over logic or accuracy. All this goes against the way we are taught at school to think and to communicate, and against the style of professions that need college or an advanced degree. For those embedded in that culture of thought, Trump’s typical stump speech makes him sound like an idiot. To many outside that culture, Trump sounds “like one of us.”
Another measure of educational level, the percentage of a state population that has an advanced degree such as an MS or law degree, is also strongly anti-correlated with support for Trump (states with the fewest advanced degrees are most pro-Trump). A 15% increase in the population percentage with advanced degrees is associated with a 70% decrease in Trump voting margins. It’s not that the extra people with advanced degrees are simply providing more votes against Trump, but that the places where those people tend to live tend to oppose Trump.
3. Christian Nationalism
Why are Evangelicals so keen on Trump? One might think that it is because they see Trump as a way of enacting their agenda on social issues, but as early as February 2016 there was strong Evangelical support for Trump over more conservative candidates such as Ted Cruz or Mike Huckabee. During the primary, several observers pointed to Evangelicals wanting a “strong” and “anti-establishment” leader.
In the abstract, it is strange that devout Christians would be so attracted to a figure like Trump, not only because of his many unethical personal behaviors, but also because the attraction of a “strong” leader who demonizes foreigners and emphasizes retribution contradicts a religion which commands its followers to love the stranger who sojourns in their land, rejects retaliation and proclaims solidarity with the outcast and the impoverished.
However, conservative Christianity in the United States has a strong component of identity politics. It serves as a marker to separate “them” from “us”. This aspect of religion can be seen in its most pure state within the beliefs known as Christian Nationalism. Christian Nationalism merges American identity with Christian identity. It includes beliefs that real Americans are Christian, and that American law and government should be based on Christianity. Surveys indicate that about 10% of Americans can be considered “adherents” who completely agree with these sentiments, and about 20% are “sympathizers” who partly agree with them.
Christian Nationalism is increasingly seen as “a form of nascent or proto-fascism” because it shares with fascism characteristics such as support for authoritarian strongmen and repressive “law and order” tactics, nativism instead of pluralism, anxiety about threats to traditional hierarchies and sexual norms, and a sense of victimization at the hands of outsiders.
It is strongly correlated with voting for Trump, as the following figure from PRRI shows. As with the previous figure for voting and prevalence of advanced degrees, the correlation does not necessarily mean that the presence of Christian Nationalists is a cause of a bigger Trump vote. But the degree of correlation is striking.
4. Varieties of Support for Trump in Context
The data shown in Section 1 tells us that being an Evangelical Christian or not is a more consistent predictor of Whites voting for Trump than having a college degree or not.
In terms of winning elections, this data may not be relevant. When counting votes in a state where the margin of victory is small, the result will be about the same if the Trump vote drops from 25% to 20% among non-Whites, from 40% to 35% among White blue-collar non-Evangelicals, or from 85% to 80% among White blue-collar Evangelicals.
Evangelical Christians may be especially drawn to Trump because so many of them support Christian Nationalism, which tends to applaud rather than decry Trump’s authoritarian and xenophobic tendencies. If that is the case, then this group poses a special threat to the United States. To the extent that their loyalties are to a future theocratic United States, they are less likely to be repelled by Trump’s attacks on American institutions, including our democratic government. They provide a large reservoir of people from which extremists, including violent extremists, can be drawn. Trump’s ability to energize such extremists, while retaining substantial support among a broader segment of the population makes him an especially dangerous threat to the country.
Some Details
Data for 2nd pair of figures comes from wikipedia entries on 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections. For first pair of figures, division of college degree holders that are Evangelicals is from PRRI report.