Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

Support for populist candidates increases following an economic crisis, a pattern observed worldwide (Funke, Schularick, & Trebesch, 2016). This pattern held in 2016, with higher than anticipated levels of support for populist candidates in both major U.S. political parties. On the left, Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination with a campaign based largely on anti-elitist themes. Donald Trump won the Republican nomination and ultimately the presidential election using rhetoric that resonated with discontented and disconnected voters. Accusations of dishonesty and malfeasance were common. We studied the extent to which populist attitudes among voters may have played a role in Trump’s election, and examined the association between populist attitudes and belief in various claims made during the campaigns.

Our analysis was based on a sample of 3,835 members of a nationally representative internet panel who had completed a series of surveys after the election. We adjusted the sample for design effects and non-participation; post-stratifying on sociodemographic variables and location.

To measure populist beliefs, we used a 9-item subset of a populism scale (Oliver and Rahn, 2016) comprising three subscales: mistrust of expert opinions, national affiliation, and anti-elitism. To explore the association between populism and likelihood of agreeing with or rejecting information, we asked respondents to rate as true, probably true, probably false, or false a list of eight statements reflecting campaign claims. We chose statements supported or refuted by governmental sources or peer-reviewed scientific reports, and followed up with those who rated a statement as false to assess the direction of disagreement. We created a scale score summarizing level of disagreement with expert assessment of the statements’ validity (“statements” score). We measured 2016 presidential vote with a single question asked immediately after the election.

Populist attitudes negatively correlated with household income, and varied significantly across regions of the U.S. The statements score correlated highly with the mistrust experts subscale, and we observed similar regional variation in the two scores. The statements score also correlated with nationalism.

Compared to all other candidates’ voters, Trump voters’ beliefs were less likely to align with experts on validity of campaign statements. Trump voters scored higher on mistrust of experts and national affiliation subscales than others, but were significantly lower on anti-elitism. These findings replicate Oliver and Rahn’s pre-election study along the first two dimensions, but diverge starkly along anti-elitism. This is suggestive that this one element of populism, the aggrieved sense that the system is rigged against the individual and little can be done to affect the way that government runs, may be mutable. The difference between pre and post-election findings may reflect an effect of Trump’s upset win on his supporters’ sense of living in a system that once felt aligned against them. The anti-elitism subscale may thus be in some part measuring a sense of American disenfranchisement.