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Though pundits have been scrambling to find new and inventive ways to describe the extraordinary nature of this year’s midterm elections, in one respect they’re just like the 2014, 2010, and 2006 contests: they’re the most expensive on record. Money has poured, in particular, into Democratic candidates’ coffers, with mediagenic figures like Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke collecting massive amounts from out-of-state donors.
Thomas Ferguson is the leading scholar of money in American politics, having produced study after study on the subject since the 1980s. In books like Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics and Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems, he has traced the way “investors” in political parties have shaped US politics from the American Revolution to the present. In a paper on spending in the 2016 election, for example, Ferguson and his colleagues found that while Hillary Clinton was certainly the biggest beneficiary of capital’s largesse, money pouring into Republican senate races was actually central to Trump’s victory.
Now, in a new paper, Ferguson takes on an even more controversial topic: voter behavior in 2016. Since the election, the liberal press has been quick to dismiss interpretations of Trump’s victory as linked to the stagnating economic fortunes of most Americans. These kinds of explanations, they argue, simply excuse the racism that drove Trump to power. While not dismissing the role of racism in Trump’s election, Ferguson and his colleague’s new work shows the way an economy for the 1 percent paved the way for Trump’s victory.
In the following interview, conducted by sociology PhD student Paul Heideman, Ferguson discusses his research on the 2016 election, the future of the Democratic Party, and the state of US politics on the eve of today’s midterms.
PH
You and your colleagues trace the “populist” upsurges of 2016 in both major parties to the runaway growth of a “dual economy” in America and the failure of our money-driven political system to do anything about this but talk. Yet among liberal commentators in the mainstream media it’s now all but axiomatic that economics cannot explain the election. They pin its outcome on racial resentment and gender prejudices. What’s your take on this line of argument?
TF
The short answer is that these folks are running a perfectly good point into the ground. From the day he announced — indeed, even before then, when he kept questioning where Obama was really born — Trump and his campaign hammered away on racial and gender-related themes. I doubt there was any dog whistle he and the campaign didn’t try out.
But Trump was also making noises that no other major Republican challenger had in many years. Parts of his critique of international finance, globalization, outsourcing, and free trade overlapped with Sanders’s. Also like Sanders, instead of burying his listeners in a blizzard of four-point plans and policy-speak like Clinton did, he forthrightly talked about the need to restore prosperity, bring jobs back to the US, and to “drain the swamp.” He criticized Goldman Sachs, raised the prospect of repealing the carried-interest tax deduction beloved of Wall Street, and mocked Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. He also questioned the value of NATO to the US and the continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while pushing to reduce tensions with Russia.
This is not to say he was a carbon copy of Sanders; he wasn’t, as anyone who read between the lines of his comments about blue collar workers vs. unions or paid attention to what he has done since taking office on taxes, labor policy, and immigration.
But the economic appeals were clear and powerful.
In the days after the election, I was astounded how fast the Clinton campaign’s notion that it was all due to the “deplorables” crystallized into “common sense” in so many quarters. Or the parallel wave of assertions that the electorate’s rejection of her was a convulsive reaction to the election of the first black president in American history. That one seemed to me quite implausible: why should the reaction be so much stronger in 2016 than in 2012, when Obama was running for reelection?
Trump’s boasting about his sexual conquests and tirades about women’s rights and roles and his volte face on abortion to please the Right were all obvious, but even newspaper polls suggested that the story had to be more complicated in regard to white women and possibly even Hispanics.
TF
If you look closely, you will see a kind of schizophrenia pervades these. Studies by Shannon Monnat and other scholars that analyze aggregate county-level voting returns suggest that Trump’s appeals resonated especially strongly in poorer areas left out of the painfully slow recovery of the Obama years. The force of the dual economy explanation is plain in these.
But the big studies of individual voters do not show this pattern. One problem with them is that the economic variables that you would really like to have — for example, vulnerability to imports, but above all longer-run trends in economic growth — are just not to be found in the data these studies collect. They can only be added at enormous time and expense and sometimes not at all. Statistical software for relating complex surveys of individuals to local growth patterns over time is also imperfectly developed.
TF
Exactly. So my old colleague Ben Page and I set out to analyze the American National Election Survey data afresh. We compiled a lot of data about congressional districts and related this to the survey data. My colleague Jie Chan and several of Ben’s students eventually joined us. Our first, somewhat preliminary, paper is now out as a working paper.
We agree completely with the studies that find racial resentment and gender considerations played substantial roles in the election outcome. We also concur…
