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Trump Voters Are Feeling It

Supporters of President-elect Donald Trump at a rally in Ohio last week.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Donald Trump’s supporters from the white working and middle class are, for the moment, elated.

In a survey conducted by Pew after the election, 96 percent of those who cast votes for Trump said they were hopeful; 74 percent said they were “proud.” They were almost unanimous in their expectation that Trump will have a successful first term.

High spirits among the victors notwithstanding, naysayers have supplied grim assessments of Trump’s long-term prospects, economically speaking, which are reflected in headlines like “Why Trump — or any other politician — can’t do much to bring back manual labor jobs” and “Trump’s promise to bring back jobs is ignorant and cruel.”

In a paper subtitled “President-elect Trump’s promise to bring back production jobs ignores the realities of advanced manufacturing,” Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings, argued that “no one should be under the illusion that millions of manufacturing jobs are coming back to America.”

Still, there is a legitimate case to be made that just by giving voice to those in the white working class who are distrustful, alienated and isolated from contemporary culture, Trump will provide temporary relief from the stress that these voters experience — much as the nomination and election of Barack Obama did for black and Hispanic voters in 2008.

“Whether or not Trump can or should attempt to reverse the decline in manufacturing jobs is not the big story here. He can’t,” Tim Duy, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon and a critic of Trump’s policies, wrote on his blog on Sunday:

The real story is that he continues to tap into the anger of his voters about being left behind. That will give him much more power than our criticisms will take away.

Validation of voter grievances, in and of itself, is a powerful political and psychological tool.

But there are more than grievances at stake. Three scholars — Jennifer Malat and Jeffrey M. Timberlake, sociology professors at the University of Cincinnati, and David R. Williams, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health — examined the self-reported health status of 46,000 Ohio residents from Aug. 6, 2008, to Jan. 24, 2009. The survey deliberately oversampled blacks and Hispanics.

The study that resulted, “The Effects of Obama’s Political Success on the Self-rated Health of Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites,” found that

major positive macro-level events, such as the initial success of a black political candidate on the national stage, may have an immediate, positive effect on the health of blacks and Hispanics.

Malat, Timberlake and Williams determined that the strongest effects on self-reported health were found right “after the nomination of Obama as the candidate for the Democratic Party” when the “odds of reporting excellent health rose significantly for blacks and Hispanics.” Among African Americans, the likelihood of reporting excellent health nearly doubled, from 7 to 13 percent, and for Hispanics it nearly quadrupled, from 6 to 22 percent, although the Hispanic sample was small and less reliable.

Williams noted in an email that similar positive effects

have been documented for Nelson Mandela’s election among black South Africans and for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign among African Americans.

Could this work for Trump’s white voters?

It is a reasonable assumption that Trump’s election “would have positive mental health effects on working class whites,” Williams told me. But, he added,

equally important, it is likely that Trump’s campaign and election had negative health effects on minorities, immigrants, Muslims and other marginalized groups.

I asked Philip Gold, a doctor who is a senior investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health and an expert on depression, whether Trump could alter the sense of loss and anger among voters who threw their support to him this year. Gold replied by email:

When Trump recognized the plight of the individuals who had lost their jobs in the rust belt and made a big point about it to the whole nation, I feel that this was likely to raise the morale of many people in the Midwest who were depressed or demoralized, which is a great risk factor for depression. He recognized their dire situation. He emphasized that it wasn’t because of their deficiency or their fault in any way. Finally he let them know that help was on the way.

What Gold and others are less certain of is how long-lasting the beneficial effects of simple recognition will be in addressing the deep reservoir of white estrangement and hopelessness that survey data has revealed. In other words, does Trump have to deliver substantial changes in the job market and living conditions or does he just have to be in their corner?

Carol Graham is a senior fellow at Brookings and a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland. She is the principal author of “Unhappiness in America: Desperation in white towns, resilience and diversity in the cities.”

Graham found that poor whites describe themselves as highly stressed and that they are nine percent more likely than middle class whites to say they experienced stress in the previous day. There are racial differences, Graham added, in the self-reported experience of stress: “Poor blacks are 47 percent less likely to say they experience stress than poor whites” and those differences remain “constant over the other income groups as well.”

Graham’s work is based on Gallup data for hundreds of thousands of respondents. The paper looks at optimism and pessimism specifically:

Among the poor, controlling for socio-demographic factors, blacks are by far the most optimistic cohort, and are close to three times more likely to be higher up on the optimism scale than poor whites.

Research by Shervin Assari, an investigator in the department of psychiatry at the University of Michigan and co-author of the paper “Depressive Symptoms Are Associated with More Hopelessness among White than Black Older Adults,” supports Graham’s thesis. Whites whom he studied, Assari reported, were less resilient, had higher suicide rates and reported higher levels of pain in their daily lives than blacks did.

In their widely covered 2015 study, “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century, ” Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton, found

a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis.

An important approach to depression in the psychological and evolutionary literature has been to view it as an evolved response to “involuntary subordination,” to being displaced from dominance. This is exactly what happens when you have to accept a subordinate position on a status ladder because you lost your job and can’t find a comparable one.

In the book “Subordination and Defeat,” Paul Gilbert, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Derby, describes this process:

Because in any conflict situation there will often be a winner and a loser, a central question arises: Which strategies have evolved to enable the one who is losing to decide when to try harder and when to accept the inevitably of defeat.

Fighting back “when the odds against one are overwhelming is maladaptive,” Gilbert argues, because the “loser wastes energy in a fruitless struggle and may even risk serious injury.” The loser’s best choice, according to Gilbert’s research, is “aggression suppression” — acquiescence to involuntary subordination.

“Submission may be highly ambivalent,” Gilbert writes:

People may recognize that they have to behave submissively to reduce the tensions or threats between themselves and a more dominant and powerful other, and feel relief when they succeed, but they may still harbor desires for later revenge. Thus, in some situations, subordinate behavior can involve the inhibition of aggression expression, but not reduce the motive or desire to attack, challenge or dominate.” In fact, “submissive behavior in depression was significantly associated with angry thoughts and feelings, but not aggressive behaviors.

Gold of the National Institute of Mental Health took up a similar thought in more direct terms:

The best verified animal model of depression consists of social defeat. A dominant rat is placed in a cage with a younger, stronger rat from another group. When the dominant rat is defeated, several features emerge. The defeated rat is reclusive, hyper-vigilant, avoidant, and shows an incapacity to experience pleasure.

According to Gold, a parallel development occurs in the case of human beings:

A loss of a job or other events that lower a person’s rank, status, or capacity to make an adequate living are the most malignant stressors that people experience. Most people internalize the event and hold themselves responsible. They are most prone to depression after such a loss.

The results can be psychologically excruciating:

The sense of vulnerability that people who lose rank experience is tremendous. They are often ashamed of the loss. They feel it is their fault. They fear that people will no longer be interested in them and that they will be alone. Loss of self-respect is the most fundamental of losses.

Going into the last election, nearly three quarters (72 percent) of those supporting Trump said that American society and its way of life had changed for the worse since the 1950s, according to an Oct. 25 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute. Only white evangelicals, a crucial part of Trump’s victorious coalition, were more critical of contemporary life, at 74 percent.

Similarly, white men — who backed Trump 62-31, according to exit polls — feel far more oppressed by what they view as censorious political correctness than any other demographic group, according to P.R.R.I. Asked to choose between two statements – “Even if certain people are offended, it is important to speak frankly about sensitive issues and problems facing the country” and “It’s important to avoid using language that is hurtful and offensive to some people when discussing sensitive issues” – white men chose “speak frankly” 69-27, a larger margin than any other group.

A study that was conducted by the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and released in August, “The Vanishing Center of American Democracy,” provides the strongest evidence of the presence of feelings of involuntary subordination among Trump supporters.

The study found that when Trump supporters were asked if they agreed with the statement “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country,” 46.2 percent said yes, compared to 30.9 percent of Clinton backers. 68.32 percent agreed that “The leaders in American corporations, media, universities, and technology care little about the lives of most Americans,” compared to 53 percent of Clinton voters.

Most significant, 75.7 percent of Trump voters agreed with the statement “the government in Washington threatens the freedom of ordinary Americans” — almost double the 39.5 percent of Clinton voters who agreed.

The obvious question is what will happen if, over time, Trump disappoints his buoyant supporters and revives their feelings of discontent and estrangement. How will they respond to continued economic marginalization and a failure on Trump’s part to produce sufficient numbers of good jobs at good pay?

If rising expectations are thwarted, the radical white nationalism of the alt-right holds the potential to become more broadly attractive. Disheartened voters can quickly become a caldron of resentment and discontent. They may seek out a leader who promises solutions even more sweeping and uncompromising than the ones Trump has proposed. There is no way to predict where anger will lead if the promises Trump made do not materialize, and if the numbers of those marginalized by hyper competition — by automation, offshoring, skill mismatch and the forces of globalization — continue to increase inexorably. Where will the blame fall then?

A correction was made on 
Dec. 8, 2016

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a senior fellow at Brookings. He is Mark Muro, not Munro. It also misstated the affiliation of the sociologist Jeffrey M. Timberlake. He is an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati, not the University of Chicago.

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