A poll released on Thursday from the Public Religion Research Institute showed Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump 47-41 in the presidential race; by itself, that’s not that interesting, since that’s right where polling averages have the race. But one particular finding from their poll got a lot of attention in the media, simply because it’s a question no one has really thought to ask before, but the answer makes a lot of intuitive sense.
White voters who still live in the community in which they were raised are supporting Trump over Clinton by 26 percentage points (57% vs. 31%, respectively). Trump also has an advantage over Clinton among white voters who live within a 2-hour drive from their hometown (50% vs. 41%, respectively). However, among white voters who live farther away from their hometown, Clinton leads Trump (46% vs. 40%, respectively).
(PRRI, like Pew Research, specializes in asking deeper questions than the more mundane media pollsters, who tend to just ask about who people are voting for and their demographic data. For example, their study from November 2015, “Anxiety, Nostalgia, and Mistrust,” introduced a lot of subtlety into the debate over whether the Trump phenomenon was more about “economic anxiety” or racism, revealing that it’s about both, but bound together with a sentimental longing for something that doesn’t exist any more (and may never have existed in the first place).)
Their new finding about mobility … and the correlation between Trump support among people who are rooted in place vs. Clinton support among people who get up and move … goes a long way toward explaining the new map that we’re seeing in 2016 (which isn’t that new, really, but it’s a further evolution of trends we’ve been seeing since the 1990s). The Republicans are increasingly becoming the party of rural and exurban voters, and, relatedly, people who tend to be aggrieved about getting the short end of the stick in an increasingly globalized, knowledge-based economy. The Democrats are increasingly the party of urban and suburban voters, in other words, people who are likelier to be prospering in an economy that’s increasingly spiky and where the upward spikes are likelier to be in major metropolitan areas.