Analysis: it's easy to see why the Make America Great Again slogan resonated so strongly with groups that believe their position was better a generation ago
By Finn Lannon and Sheila Killian, University of Limerick
As president-elect Donald Trump comes to power in the United States, many of us are initially baffled at how so many people could have voted for a man who seems from the outside to be opposed to their interests. Trump has drawn votes in numbers, for instance, from young working class men and from areas of the country which have fallen behind. This is despite the fact that he did little for these groups during his first term in the White House.
So why are people voting for Trump now in such numbers? It doesn't take a political analyst to see how starkly divided the US is around Trump. The country is mapped in red and blue, with precious few areas of purple to indicate some plurality of views. He is such a divisive figure one might be forgiven for thinking he could never gain a majority to become president.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's News at One, analysis of Donald Trump's sweeping victory in US presidential election
But what if it is that very divisiveness, and the divided nature of society, that is his path to power? Census and survey information reported by the New York Times shows that while the economic power of white men who didn't go to university has not declined very much in absolute terms, their income on average has been surpassed over time by other groups, like college-educated women.
In 1980, among full-time workers, white men without a college degree earned 8% above the average wage. In 2022, their wages had broadly kept pace with inflation, but they were by now more than 10% below the average. It’s not that they are poorer, in real terms, but it’s that they have lost a lot of the economic status they held relative to others.
Social identity theory deals with the way in which people take some of their sense of self from social groups they belong to – a Liverpool fan, an accountant, a Dubliner, an Irish woman – and the status of those groups relative to others. This affects our behavior, and the actions we take. Our research shows that where an individual feels part of a group in society that is economically worse off than another, this can drive them to take collective action like protesting, campaigning or voting.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, veteran Republican party activist Grant Lally on why Trump won
It is not the absolute level of economic well-being that drives action, but the comparison. Even where everyone is doing better on average, voters look at their place in the herd. White men without a third level education used to lead economically, but others have now overtaken them. Our research also shows that this upward comparison – focusing on the groups who are doing better than us – will drive collective action not so much to eliminate inequality, but to improve the position of our own group.
This is a powerful force that seems to have been successfully deployed by the Trump campaign. By drawing the attention of voters in groups whose position has declined to the fact that other groups are now doing better, they have increased the chances of that voter coming out to vote for a change in the status quo. These votes are intensely local and personal.
It seems that Trump voters were not really focused on reducing inequality or the common good overall. Perhaps they simply looked back on a time when their social group had more status in society, and was relatively better off, and they followed a man who promised to bring that back for them. It’s not the economy, it’s the status, and that in turn is built on inequality.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, what swung undecided voters to Trump?
States can also be social groups. Crucially, many of the swing states that earned Trump the presidency show a really strong decline in average fulltime wages relative to that of other states. Almost half of the 93 electoral college votes from swing states come from Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, part of the area disparagingly known as the Rust Belt, in reference to the decline in manufacturing there.
In Michigan, full-time wages were more than 10% above the national average in 1980. Now, they languish significantly below. It’s the same story with slightly different numbers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In these states, voters look around the US as a whole and see how their relative importance has declined. In voting for Trump, they were not necessarily voting for a stronger economy for the US as a whole, but rather for an improvement in their own relative status. They were hankering after the memory of an earlier time when they were ahead of the curve.
The Trump campaign has harnessed a powerful and largely unarticulated sense of inter-group unfairness and used it to drive them into power
Looked at through a social identity lens it's easy to see why the Make America Great Again slogan resonates so strongly with any group that believes their position was relatively better a generation ago. The Trump campaign has harnessed this powerful and largely unarticulated sense of inter-group unfairness and used it to drive them into power.
So, what does all of this imply for how a Trump presidency will play out? Will he respond to the inequality felt by his supporters by taking measures to reduce it, and in the process create a more united country? Or will he decide that it is the division itself that has brought him to power, and the inequality that is his political strength? In that case, if his personal ambition overcomes his mandate, it does not bode well for the next four years in America.
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Finn Lannon is a researcher in social psychology at University of Limerick, working on the impact of economic inequality on collective action. Prof Sheila Killian is Professor of Accountability at University of Limerick. Both are members of the Accountability Research Cluster at the Kemmy Business School.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
