The roots of Trump support

It seems to be living near failure, not necessarily experiencing it yourself:

Yet a major new analysis from Gallup, based on 87,000 interviews the polling company conducted over the past year, suggests this narrative is not complete. According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared to people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.

Yet while Trump’s supporters might be comparatively well off themselves, they come from places where their neighbors endure other forms of hardship. In their communities, white residents are dying younger, and it is harder for young people who grow up poor to get ahead.

The Gallup analysis is the most comprehensive statistical profile of Trump’s supporters so far. Jonathan Rothwell, the economist at Gallup who conducted the analysis, sorted the respondents by their Zip code and then compared those findings with a host of other data from a variety of sources.

That is from Max Ehrenfreund and Jeff Guo at the always-excellent Wonkblog.  And there is this:

White households tend be more affluent than other households, and Trump’s supporters are overwhelmingly white. The same is true of Republicans in general. Yet when Rothwell focused only on white Republicans, he also found that demographically similar respondents who were more affluent viewed Trump more favorably.

These results suggest that personal finances cannot account alone for Trump’s appeal. His popularity with less educated men is probably due to some other trait that these supporters share.

Rothwell’s results also very much downplay the roles of trade and China, compared to some other estimates.  Here is a link to Rothwell summarizing some of these results, I am not sure if there is a link to the full study proper.