Trump supporters are often portrayed as economically stressed victims of globalization and the decline of US manufacturing, worried about job security and stagnating incomes. But as the last post documented, they do not appear to be plagued by trouble finding work. By and large, Trump Country has low unemployment rates.
Perhaps the issue is finding decent jobs – secure jobs with advancement potential. Since Trump support varies across states, state rankings of work environments might shed some light on the quality of jobs in areas with the strongest Trump support – that is, where the Trump won the vote.
WalletHub, personal finance website, provided just such a ranking earlier this year, in an analysis of the 50 states and District of Columbia along three key dimensions related to happiness. Sources of data were theU.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Council for Community and Economic Research, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Feeding America, Corporation for National and Community Service, Gallup-Healthways, TripAdvisor, Hedonometer.org, Social Science Research Council, Regents of the University of Minnesota and WalletHub’s own research group. One of the ranked dimensions was Work Environment, which included:
- Commute Time
- Income Level (personal earnings adjusted by cost of living
- Number of Work Hours
- Current Unemployment Rate
- Long-Term Unemployment Rate
- Job Security (measures probability of unemployment)
- Income-Growth Rate
The top ten states with the best “Work Environments” were Utah, North Dakota, Idaho, Montana, Iowa, South Dakota, Delaware, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Oklahoma. Note that eight of these states went to Trump in the presidential election.
Of course, the WalletHub findings are from just one research study. But these findings are in line with data from other sources. For instance, the Census Bureau's numbers on inequality show that states that voted for Trump tended to be the least unequal. And in a recent analysis of Gallup survey data for 125,000 American adults, the authors found that Trump supporters “earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration.”
The point in these posts isn’t to create a new profile of the typical Trump supporter but to undermine a simplistic narrative about what make Trump supporters tick.
Next: the other side of the ledger/evidence of economic distress motivating Trump support.
Reference:
Rothwell, Jonathan T. and Diego-Rosell, Pablo, Explaining Nationalist Political Views: The Case of Donald Trump (November 2, 2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2822059 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2822059