What Makes a Trump Voter

Breaking down the New Hampshire exit polls

Photo by Arnaud Jaegers on Unsplash

As predicted, Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. But his Republican opponent, Nikki Haley, made a decent-enough showing, and so of course Trump is melting down on social media.

Barring some major event, Trump is still clearly set to be his party’s nominee. New Hampshire isn’t exactly representative of red state politics; it’s a pretty moderate place, and its brand of Republican is far from the fire-breathing Evangelical variety you find across the Bible Belt. And yet still, Trump beat out a woman who is, though far from moderate, less of an absolute knucklehead, more electable, and more of a run-of-the-mill Republican. She is the viable alternative that many Republican voters have said they’re looking for. It turns out they don’t really want a viable alternative. They want Trump.

It’s fascinating to look at the exit polls to get a better sense of who voted for the guy, and who wanted a different GOP future. There are some predictable outcomes: Trump’s strongest supporters remain non-college whites, and Haley did much better among those who are college-educated, those who are more financially stable, those who think things are going pretty well, and those who identify as liberal or independent. But there are a few surprises in there, too.

Trump Support Skewed Young

Age wasn’t a huge factor in the New Hampshire primary, and Trump won across all age groups. But his support was strongest among the youngest voters, those under the age of 30. That’s not a big group — they made up fewer than one in ten of the voters in CNN’s exit poll — but 60% of them voted for Trump, compared to 51% of voters 65 and up.

Singles Love Trump

It’s perhaps not surprising that male voters strongly supported Trump, while female voters were more or less evenly divided. But even more interesting than the gender gap is the marriage gap: A stunning 66% of unmarried men, and 56% of unmarried women, voted for Trump over Haley. The near 50-50 split among women was driven by the fact that married women (33% of the electorate) were more likely by a hair to support Haley, while unmarried women (16% of the electorate) were much more likely to vote for Trump.

This is odd because singles generally tend to be more liberal than their married counterparts, which is why single women have been such a force in favor of Democrats — and why the rise of single women in America has been such a political game-changer. That the reverse seems to be true in today’s GOP — that married women and to a lesser extent married men prefer the more moderate candidate, while singles go for the extremist — certainly complicates the traditional narrative about marriage as a conservatizing force.

Or perhaps we’ve just been thinking about “conservatizing” wrong: If marriage pulls people more toward the status quo, the safe, and the predictable, then these results start to make more sense. Haley is the “conservative” choice in the sense of keeping things the same. Trump’s politics are more radical and more extreme, but he also threatens (or promises, depending on your view) chaos and a total remaking of the nation. He is in many ways better understood as a revolutionary and radical candidate, not a merely far-right conservative one.

And among voters with children under 18, the results get even weirder, because dads with minor kids like Trump. Men with children under 18 supported Trump at 63% to Haley’s 35%, while women with minor children were again more or less evenly divided between the candidates. Trump had a smaller advantage among men without minor children. Haley also did better among women without children compared to how she did among single women (Trump still bested her with both groups).

These adults without minor children represent two groups: Those who have never had children, who are disproportionately young and single, and those whose children are grown and out of the house, who are (obviously) older. That Trump’s strongest support comes from men with minor children in the house perhaps tells us more about the age of your average Trump supporter than any influence young parenthood might have. But it nevertheless struck me that the men who are more likely to be socially connected, employed, stable by a wider variety of measures, and tied to institutions — married men — were still Trump supporters, but were more likely than single men to support Haley over Trump. yet there wasn’t such a pronounced difference among fathers, who you might also expect to be more stable. I’d be interested to see the differences between married men with minor children and unmarried men with minor children, and I would bet it’s significant.