Political Alienation and the Trump Vote in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential Elections

Abstract Following Donald Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 US presidential election, some popular and scholarly sources suggested that Trump’s candidacy may have been bolstered, in part, by the mobilization of “politically alienated” voters. This argument is puzzling, however, as certain forms of political alienation are often negatively related to political participation, making it unclear whether or how alienation may have been related to turnout and to support for Trump at the ballot box. I shed light on this puzzle using data from the American National Election Studies, which contain measures of two dimensions of political alienation: inefficacy and cynicism. With these data I examine how either dimension relates to turnout and to vote choice in 2016 and in 2020. Cynicism emerges as a positive predictor of both turnout and the Trump vote in 2016, but not in 2020. Inefficacy, however, does not positively predict turnout or the Trump vote in either election. I offer a potential explanation for the diminished relationship between cynicism and mobilization in the 2020 elections by applying a Structural Topic Model to open-ended survey responses about Trump, which reveals a substantial decrease in the salience of Trump’s “political outsider” qualities during his reelection bid.