Slate, April 24, 2018: Status whoa
Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote.” So says an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Diana C. Mutz, a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The piece is based on a study Mutz recently conducted and is the latest entry in this long-running debate, which has been crudely boiled down to “economics or bigotry” as the possible factors driving Trump’s shocking victory. But Mutz’s approach is different. “The way this analysis is framed,” she explained when we recently spoke by phone, “is that we are looking at what caused people to change their minds and not vote for the candidate of the party that they traditionally do. So what we are looking at is the relatively small number of people who voted Democrat in 2012 and Republican in 2016.
