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The White Working Class and Voter Turnout in US Presidential Elections, 2004—2016
Abstract
Through an analysis of the 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 Current Population Surveys, as well as the 2004 through 2016 General Social Surveys, this article investigates class differences and patterns of voter turnout for the last four US presidential elections. After developing some support for the claim that a surge of white working-class voters emerged in competitive states in 2016, a portrait of class differences on political matters among white non-Hispanic eligible voters between 2004 and 2016 is offered to consider the consequences of this compositional shift. These latter results are consistent with the claim that racial prejudice, anti-immigrant sentiment, concerns about economic security, and frustration with government responsiveness may have led many white working-class voters to support an outsider candidate who campaigned on these themes. However, these same results give no support to the related claim that the white working class changed its positions on these matters in response to the 2016 primary election campaign or in the months just before the general election.
Although previous research consistently finds a strong relationship between parent and child voting, the role of parent encouragement, or verbal instruction, remains less clear. In addition, few studies in this area have attempted to determine the causal mechanisms which drive this association. This study models a potential outcomes approach to causality and investigates the causal relationship between parent encouragement to vote and young adult turnout and informed voting behaviors. Results indicate that, after conditioning on factors that determine selection into treatment, parent encouragement leads to an increase of 30% in likelihood of voting and increases scores on a 6-point informed voting index by 1.04. This demonstrates the large role that parents play in determining youth engagement, while beginning to develop a more complete causal framework for how and why young people come to be active participants in public life.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to respond to Morgan’s article, which is a critique of my recent publication (Mutz 2018). I will restrict my response to matters concerning the data and analysis, excluding issues such as whether the journal PNAS is appropriately named (Morgan this issue:3) as well as Morgan’s views about how this work was covered in various media outlets (Morgan this issue:3–6). These issues are less important than whether material self-interest or status threat motivated Trump supporters.
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