Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election caught many political experts by surprise. Looking to uncover the reasons for this unexpected outcome, social scientists presented several ...explanations in the election’s aftermath. In this article, I discuss one of these explanations: Trump’s success in winning white working-class voters by an overwhelming margin. I also discuss his success in narrowing the advantage that Democratic presidential candidates typically enjoy with voters in union households. Using data from the 2012 and 2016 National Election Pool (NEP), and the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), the results in this work show that Donald Trump won the support of white working-class voters and was competitive with voters in union households. By expanding previous Republican margins with white working-class voters and by narrowing the Democrats’ typical union household advantage, Trump secured himself victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which ultimately won him the election. Four years later, exit polls indicated that Trump’s support among these groups in the 2020 election was still strong but somewhat diminished.
This article examines the surprising outcome of the 2016 presidential election, which saw Donald Trump defy nearly all of the conventional wisdom to become the 45th president of the United States. ...Political commentators and experts offered several immediate postelection explanations for Trump’s victory, one of which focused on how Trump was able to generate considerable unpaid or free media for himself, often directly through Twitter. This article explains the theory and rationale underlying the free media thesis (FMT) and then examines whether there is any preliminary empirical support for it. Using media tracking data and public opinion surveys, the results reveal that Trump indeed dominated the unpaid media market. Although the findings in this article cannot make causal claims about whether Trump’s advantages in free media are the primary reason for his upset victory, the results, nonetheless, suggest that some of the basic conditions necessary for the FMT were present in the 2016 election and that the FMT offers a plausible avenue for further analysis and future research.
Despite large population gains, political observers commonly refer to Latinos as a "sleeping giant" because of low voter turnout. Conversely, steady declines in union membership have led some to ...label organized labor a "dinosaur." Several unions have made special outreach efforts to Latinos to rebuild their ranks and improve Latino political participation. Incorporating insights from the Civic Voluntarism Model, we find union affiliation increases Latino voter registration and turnout, and disproportionately so in comparison with non-Latinos and in recent elections. We conclude that continued declines in union membership have significant implications for Latino political power and inequalities in political voice.
Previous research finds that misinformation is often difficult to correct once a person accepts it as truth. Nonetheless, a few studies have shown evidence that fact-checkers can help lower an ...individual's susceptibility to believing false news and rumors. Our study builds on this research by examining the fact-checking inoculation effect on political misinformation (also known as "fake news") that circulated on the Internet in the months following the election of President Donald Trump. Using an experimental design, we find only selected instances of inoculation effects. Instead, our results are consistent with previous studies that show individuals are more likely to accept or reject misinformation based on whether it is consistent with their pre-existing partisan and ideological beliefs. However, partisanship and ideology played a much stronger role in predicting believability for fake news stories critical of Democrats than stories critical of Republicans.
The authors argue in this study that religious beliefs play a significant role in predicting American public opinion on foreign policy issues in the Middle East. Their findings reveal that ...Evangelical Christians have remained strong supporters of a hawkish foreign policy toward the Middle East, even as overall public support for the Iraq War declines. They also find that Evangelicals are among the strongest supporters of Israel and hold more negative views of Islam than others. These results reinforce the growing importance of the "faith factor" in public opinion and American politics as a whole.
In this study, the authors test for the presence of bias during Fox News and CNN's coverage of the 2004 national party conventions. The content analysis demonstrates that Fox News's coverage was more ...favorable to the Republican Party than it was to the Democratic Party, while CNN's coverage was more impartial. The authors also use panel data from the National Annenberg Election Survey to show how opinion change toward the 2004 presidential candidates was associated with exposure to cable television coverage of the national party conventions. These findings highlight the evolving role of the cable news media in presidential campaigns and elections.
This article examines the surprising outcome of the 2016 presidential election, which saw Donald Trump defy nearly all of the conventional wisdom to become the 45th president of the United States. ...Political commentators and experts offered several immediate postelection explanations for Trump’s victory, one of which focused on how Trump was able to generate considerable unpaid or free media for himself, often directly through Twitter. This article explains the theory and rationale underlying the free media thesis (FMT) and then examines whether there is any preliminary empirical support for it. Using media tracking data and public opinion surveys, the results reveal that Trump indeed dominated the unpaid media market. Although the findings in this article cannot make causal claims about whether Trump’s advantages in free media are the primary reason for his upset victory, the results, nonetheless, suggest that some of the basic conditions necessary for the FMT were present in the 2016 election and that the FMT offers a plausible avenue for further analysis and future research.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), labor organizations top its so-called "heavy hitter" list of political action committees (PACs) that contributed and spent the most money in ...federal elections over the past twenty years. From 1989 to 2009, CRP's analysis shows that twelve of the top twenty groups on its list are labor PACs (see Table 1 (See PDF) ), and six made the top ten: the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (second on the list at $41.7 million); the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (fifth at $31.3 million); the National Education Association (seventh at $30 million); the Laborers Union (eighth at $28.7 million); the Service Employees International Union (ninth at $27.8 million); and the Carpenters and Joiners Union (tenth at $27.7 million). ... unlike many of the corporate and business groups that spread their donations to candidates of both political parties, labor PACs overwhelmingly gave their money to Democrats.
In this study, we analyze data on public opinion and attitudes toward labor unions from the iPOLL Databank at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (University of Connecticut), the American ...National Election Study, and the Current Population Survey. Despite recent developments that suggest labor unions are in decline, we find organized labor has maintained reasonably strong public support. Although the data indicate that Americans remain skeptical about how much confidence they can place in unions and their leaders, the results make clear that the public continues to recognize the need for unions to protect the rights of workers. These results hold potentially important implications for the future of organized labor in the United States. Adapted from the source document.
