In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, an overwhelming majority of those who said they had voted for him had “warm” feelings for him.
By this spring, more than a year into Trump’s presidency, the feelings of these same Trump voters had changed very little.
In March, 82% of those who reported voting for Trump – and whom researchers were able to verify through voting records as having voted in 2016 – said they felt “warmly” toward Trump, with 62% saying they had “very warm” feelings toward him. Their feelings were expressed on a 0-100 “feeling thermometer.” A rating of 51 or higher is “warm,” with 76 or higher indicating “very warm” feelings.
The views of these same Trump voters had been quite similar in November 2016: At that time, 87% had warm feelings toward him, including 63% who had very warm feelings.
This report is based on surveys conducted on Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel. The Center tracked views of Trump among the same groups of Americans in March 2018 and at three points in 2016, including in November shortly after the election. In that survey, respondents reported whom they had voted for.
When state voter files – publicly available records of who turned out to vote – became available months after the election, respondents were matched to these files. Self-reported turnout was not used in this analysis; rather, researchers took extensive effort to determine which respondents had in fact voted. And unlike other studies that have employed voter validation, this one employs five different commercial voter files in an effort to minimize the possibility that actual voters were incorrectly classified as nonvoters due to errors in locating their turnout records.
This study also includes a detailed portrait of the electorate – which also is based on the reported voting preferences of validated voters. It casts the widely reported educational divide among white voters in 2016 into stark relief: A majority of white college graduates (55%) reported voting for Hillary Clinton, compared with 38% who supported Trump. Among the much larger share of white voters who did not complete college, 64% backed Trump and just 28% supported Clinton.
Views of Trump among Clinton voters, supporters of other candidates
Many voters who ultimately supported Trump in the general election did not always feel so warmly toward him. In April 2016, shortly before Trump secured the Republican nomination for president, a substantial share of those who would go on to vote for him in November expressed mixed, or even cold, feelings toward him: While most (65%) either viewed him warmly or very warmly, about a third (35%) felt either cold or neutral toward him. About one-in-five (19%) of those who ended up voting for Trump had very cold feelings for him at that time (rating him lower than 25 on the 0-100 scale).
Yet just a few months later, after Trump had wrapped up the GOP nomination and the general election campaign was underway, Trump voters’ feelings toward him grew more positive. And in the wake of his election victory, the feelings of these same Trump voters turned even more positive. In November 2016, 87% of Trump voters said they had warm feelings toward him; and in March of this year, 82% did so.
While most Trump voters continued to have very positive feelings for him, Clinton voters – and voters who supported Gary Johnson and Jill Stein – continued to have even more negative views of Trump.
This March, an overwhelming share (93%) of verified voters who had backed Clinton in the 2016 election gave Trump a cold rating, with 88% giving him a very cold rating. Only 3% of those who voted for Clinton felt at all warmly toward Trump. In fact, a majority of Clinton voters (65%) gave Trump the coldest possible rating (0 on the 0-100 scale).
A large majority of verified voters who reported voting for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein in 2016 also viewed Trump very negatively this spring. Among voters who said they voted for either of these candidates, 84% gave Trump a cold rating, with 70% rating him very coldly.
From cold (or neutral) to warm
About a third of Trump’s November 2016 voters (35%) had cold or neutral feelings toward him earlier that year. By September 2016, a 57% majority of these voters had warmed to him, including 24% who felt very warmly. And shortly after the election, three-quarters of these once cold or neutral voters (74%) felt warmly toward him, including 43% who rated him very warmly.
Among the 65% majority of Trump voters who felt warmly toward him in April 2016, there was much less change in opinions about him. Of this group, 90% or more maintained warm feelings toward him in September and November 2016.
And among both of these groups of verified voters who cast ballots for Trump in November – those who felt warmly toward Trump in April 2016 and those who did not – opinions about Trump changed little between November 2016 and March 2018.
Four types of Trump voters, based on their views in 2016 and 2018
Comparing Trump voters’ feelings about him in April 2016 with their views in March 2018 divides them into four groups: Enthusiasts, who had warm feelings for Trump at both points; Converts, who were initially cold or neutral but warmed over time; Skeptics, who were cold toward Trump in April 2016 and cold again in March 2018; and Disillusioned Trump voters, who were initially warm toward him but were cold or neutral in March 2018.
Enthusiasts make up the largest share of Trump voters (59% of verified voters who reported voting for Trump); they gave Trump warm ratings on the feeling thermometer in both April 2016 and March 2018. Their loyalty to Trump was evident in the primary campaign: In April 2016, six-in-ten Enthusiasts (60%) said they wanted to see Trump receive the nomination compared with just 14% of the other groups of Trump general election voters.
Converts make up the next largest share of Trump voters (23%). These voters were cold or neutral toward Trump prior to his receiving the Republican nomination. In April 2016, nearly half of Converts (44%) favored Ted Cruz for the GOP presidential nomination. But in September 2016, during the general election campaign, 73% of this group had warm feelings for Trump, including 31% who gave Trump a very warm rating. By March 2018, 71% gave him a very warm rating.
Skeptics, like Converts, had cold or neutral feelings for Trump in April 2016. Unlike Converts, however, Skeptics did not have warm feelings toward Trump nearly two years later, after he became president. Skeptics, who constitute 12% of Trump voters, reported voting for him, and their feelings for the president became somewhat warmer in the wake of the election. But their views of him grew more negative after he became president.
A very small segment of Trump voters, the Disillusioned, had warm feelings for him in April 2016 – and reported voting for him that November – but had cold or neutral feelings for him in March 2018. The Disillusioned make up just 6% of Trump voters.
Looking
at the average thermometer ratings for Trump from 2016 to 2018 among
three groups of Trump voters (there are too few of the Disillusioned for
this analysis) underscores the different trajectories in feelings
toward Trump among the Converts, Skeptics and Enthusiasts. In April 2016, the average thermometer ratings for Trump among both Converts and Skeptics were very low (27 among Converts, 24 among Skeptics). By contrast, the average rating among Enthusiasts was 85.
Shortly after the election, both Converts and Skeptics warmed considerably toward Trump, but there were sizable differences in views of the president-elect among the two groups: In November 2016, the average rating for Trump among Converts was 22 points higher than among Skeptics (79 vs. 57).
By March 2018, the average thermometer rating among Converts was 85, slightly higher than it had been shortly after the election. The average rating among Skeptics plummeted more than 20 points (from 57 to 33). The average thermometer rating for Trump among Enthusiasts remained very high over the course of the 2016 campaign and into the second year of Trump’s presidency (88 in March 2018).
In March 2018, modest gender gap in views of Trump among supporters
In
April 2016, men who ended up voting for Trump gave him somewhat higher
average thermometer ratings than did his women supporters. There were no
gender differences in November 2016, following the election. But a
significant gap is now evident. Among voters who had reported voting for
Trump, men gave him an average thermometer rating of 80 in March 2018,
unchanged from November 2016. The average rating among women Trump
voters was 74, down 7 points from shortly after the election. There were
comparable gender differences during the primary campaign in April
2016, when the average rating for Trump was 6 points higher among men
(67) than women (61) who said they voted for him. The oldest Trump voters, those in the Silent Generation (born 1928-1945), gave him the highest average thermometer ratings in March of this year (82) and in November 2016 (87). There were more modest generational differences in April of that year.
Trump voters without a four-year college degree have rated him consistently higher on the thermometer than have his supporters with a four-year college degree or more advanced education. In March of this year, the average rating among Trump voters who had not completed college was 80, compared with 72 among college graduates.
An examination of the 2016 electorate, based on validated voters
One of the biggest challenges facing those who seek to understand U.S. elections is establishing an accurate portrait of the American electorate and the choices made by different kinds of voters. Obtaining accurate data on how people voted is difficult for a number of reasons.
Surveys conducted before an election can overstate – or understate – the likelihood of some voters to vote. Depending on when a survey is conducted, voters might change their preferences before Election Day. Surveys conducted after an election can be affected by errors stemming from respondents’ recall, either for whom they voted for or whether they voted at all. Even the special surveys conducted by major news organizations on Election Day – the “exit polls” – face challenges from refusals to participate and from the fact that a sizable minority of voters actually vote prior to Election Day and must be interviewed using conventional surveys beforehand.
This report introduces a new approach for looking at the electorate in the 2016 general election: matching members of Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel to voter files to create a dataset of verified voters.
The analysis in this report uses post-election survey reports of 2016 vote preferences (conducted Nov. 29-Dec. 12, 2016) among those who were identified as having voted using official voting records. These voter file records become available in the months after the election. (For more details, see “Methodology.”) Among these verified voters, the overall vote preference mirrors the election results very closely: 48% reported voting for Hillary Clinton and 45% for Donald Trump; by comparison, the official national vote tally was 48% for Clinton, 46% for Trump.
This data source allows researchers to take a detailed look at the voting preferences of Americans across a range of demographic traits and characteristics. It joins resources already available – including the National Election Pool exit polls, the American National Election Studies and the Current Population Survey’s Voting and Registration Supplement – in hopes of helping researchers continue to refine their understanding of the 2016 election and electorate, and address complex questions such as the role of race and education in 2016 candidate preferences.
It reaffirms many of the key findings about how different groups voted – and the composition of the electorate – that emerged from post-election analyses based on other surveys. Consistent with other analyses and past elections, race was strongly correlated with voting preference in 2016. But there are some differences as well. For instance, the wide educational divisions among white voters seen in other surveys are even more striking in these data.
Among validated voters in 2016, wide gap among whites by education
Overall, whites with a four-year college degree or more education made up 30% of all validated voters. Among these voters, far more (55%) said they voted for Clinton than for Trump (38%). Among the much larger group of white voters who had not completed college (44% of all voters), Trump won by more than two-to-one (64% to 28%).
There also were large differences in voter preferences by gender, age and marital status. Women were 13 percentage points more likely than men to have voted for Clinton (54% among women, 41% among men). The gender gap was particularly large among validated voters younger than 50. In this group, 63% of women said they voted for Clinton, compared with just 43% of men. Among voters ages 50 and older, the gender gap in support for Clinton was much narrower (48% vs. 40%).
About half (52%) of validated voters were married; among them, Trump had a 55% to 39% majority. Among unmarried voters, Clinton led by a similar margin (58% to 34%).
Just 13% of validated voters in 2016 were younger than 30. Voters in this age group reported voting for Clinton over Trump by a margin of 58% to 28%, with 14% supporting one of the third-party candidates. Among voters ages 30 to 49, 51% supported Clinton and 40% favored Trump. Trump had an advantage among 50- to 64-year-old voters (51% to 45%) and those 65 and older (53% to 44%).
For a detailed breakdown of the composition of the 2016 electorate and voting preferences among a wide range of subgroups of voters, see Appendix. For the survey methodology and details on how survey respondents were matched to voter records, see “Methodology.”
2016 vote by party and ideology
Voter
choice and party affiliation were nearly synonymous. Republican
validated voters reported choosing Trump by a margin of 92% to 4%, while
Democrats supported Clinton by 94% to 5%. The roughly one-third (34%)
of the electorate who identified as independent or with another party
divided their votes about evenly (43% Trump, 42% Clinton). Similarly, voting was strongly correlated with ideological consistency, based on a scale composed of 10 political values – including opinions on race, homosexuality, the environment, foreign policy and the social safety net. Respondents are placed into five categories ranging from “consistently conservative” to “consistently liberal.” (For more, see “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider.”)
Virtually all validated voters with consistently liberal values voted for Clinton over Trump (95% to 2%), while nearly all those with consistently conservative values went for Trump (98% to less than 1% for Clinton). Those who held conservative views on most political values (“mostly conservative”) favored Trump by 87% to 7%, while Clinton received the support of somewhat fewer among those who were “mostly liberal” (78%-13%). Among the nearly one-third of voters whose ideological profile was mixed, the vote was divided (48% Trump, 42% Clinton).
Religious affiliation and attendance
As
in previous elections, voters in 2016 were sharply divided along
religious lines. Protestants constituted about half of the electorate
and reported voting for Trump over Clinton by a 56% to 39% margin.
Catholics were more evenly divided; 52% reported voting for Trump, while
44% said they backed Clinton. Conversely, a solid majority of the
religiously unaffiliated – atheists, agnostics and those who said their
religion was “nothing in particular” – said they voted for Clinton (65%)
over Trump (24%). Within the Protestant tradition, voters were divided by race and evangelicalism. White evangelical Protestants, who constituted one out of every five voters, consistently have been among the strongest supporters of Republican candidates and supported Trump by a 77% to 16% margin.
This is nearly identical to the 78% to 16% advantage that Mitt Romney held over Barack Obama among white evangelicals in Pew Research Center polling on the eve of the 2012 presidential election.
Among white mainline Protestants (15% of voters overall) 52% said they voted for Trump and 44% reported voting for Clinton. This, too, was very similar to the mainline Protestant split in 2012. Clinton won overwhelmingly among black Protestants (96% vs. 3% for Trump).
White non-Hispanic Catholics supported Trump by a ratio of about two-to-one (64% to 31%), while Hispanic Catholics favored Clinton by an even larger 78% to 19% margin.
Among all voters, those who reported attending services at least weekly favored Trump by a margin of 58% to 36%; the margin was similar among those who said they attended once or twice a month (60% to 38%). Those who reported attending services a few times a year or seldom were divided; 51% supported Clinton and 42% supported Trump. Among the nearly one-quarter of voters (23%) who said they never attend religious services, Clinton led Trump by 61% to 3o%.
Demographic and political profiles of Clinton and Trump voters
As the pattern of the votes implies, the coalitions that supported the two major party nominees were very different demographically. These differences mirror the broad changes in the compositions of the two parties: The Republican and Democratic coalitions are more dissimilar demographically than at any point in the past two decades.
In 2016, a 61% majority of those who said they voted for Clinton were women, while Trump voters were more evenly divided between men and women. Whites constituted nearly nine-in-ten (88%) of Trump’s supporters, compared with a smaller majority (60%) who voted for Clinton. Clinton’s voters also were younger than Trump’s on average (48% were younger than 50, compared with 35% for Trump).
Among Clinton voters, 43% were college graduates, compared with 29% of Trump voters. And while non-college whites made up a majority of Trump’s voters (63%), they constituted only about a quarter of Clinton’s (26%).
About a third of Clinton voters (32%) lived in urban areas, versus just 12% among Trump voters. By contrast, 35% of Trump voters said they were from a rural area; among Clinton voters, 19% lived in a rural community.
The religious profile of the two candidates’ voters also differed considerably. About a third of Clinton voters (35%) were religiously unaffiliated, as were just 14% of Trump voters. White evangelical voters made up a much greater share of Trump’s voters (34%) than Clinton’s (7%). One-in-five Trump voters (20%) were white non-Hispanic Catholics, compared with just 9% of Clinton voters. And black Protestants were 14% of Clintons supporters, while almost no black Protestants in the survey reported voting for Trump.
How did 2016 voters and nonvoters compare?
The data also provide a profile of voting-eligible nonvoters. Four-in-ten Americans who were eligible to vote did not do so in 2016. There are striking demographic differences between voters and nonvoters, and significant political differences as well. Compared with validated voters, nonvoters were more likely to be younger, less educated, less affluent and nonwhite. And nonvoters were much more Democratic.
Among
members of the panel who were categorized as nonvoters, 37% expressed a
preference for Hillary Clinton, 30% for Donald Trump and 9% for Gary
Johnson or Jill Stein; 14% preferred another candidate or declined to
express a preference. Party affiliation among nonvoters skewed even more
Democratic than did candidate preferences. Democrats and
Democratic-leaning independents made up a 55% majority of nonvoters;
about four-in-ten (41%) nonvoters were Republicans and Republican
leaners. Voters were split almost evenly between Democrats and
Democratic leaners (51%) and Republicans and Republican leaners (48%). While nonvoters were less likely than voters to align with the GOP, the picture was less clear with respect to ideology. Owing in part to the tendency of nonvoters to be politically disengaged more generally, there are far more nonvoters than voters who fall into the “mixed” category on the ideological consistency scale. Among nonvoters who hold a set of political values with a distinct ideological orientation, those with generally liberal values (30% of all nonvoters) considerably outnumbered those with generally conservative values (18%).
Voters were much more highly educated than nonvoters. Just 16% of nonvoters were college graduates, compared with 37% of voters. Adults with only a high school education constituted half (51%) of nonvoters, compared with 30% among voters. Whites without a college degree made up 43% of nonvoters, about the same as among voters (44%). But nonwhites without a college degree were far more numerous among nonvoters (at 42%) than they were among voters (19%).
There also were wide income differences between voters and nonvoters. More than half (56%) of nonvoters reported annual family incomes under $30,000. Among voters, just 28% fell into this income category.
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