Kyle Lloyd, 40, wore a painted “Dump Trump” message at a protest in Philadelphia in January. Credit Mark Makela/Getty Images



Why do people vote against their economic interests?


“Partisan identification is bigger than anything the party does,” said Frances Lee, a professor at the University of Maryland who wrote a book on partisan polarization. Rather, it stems from something much more fundamental: people’s idea of who they are.

Partisanship as Tribal Self-Expression

For American voters, party affiliation is a way to express a bundle of identities.

“It more or less boils down to how you see the conflicts in American society, and which groups you see as representing you,” Ms. Lee said. “That often means race, and religion, and ethnicity — those are the social groups that underlie party identification.”

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That process is not necessarily conscious. “There’s sort of an embarrassment about being a partisan,” Ms. Lee said. “It’s seen as admitting to a bias.” That often leads people to say that they are independent, she said, but in fact most voters consistently lean toward one of the parties.

As partisanship grows, switching parties has become rare for voters. So has ticket-splitting, in which voters support different parties in presidential and down-ballot races.

But when people do switch, it is often because they feel that the other party has become a better representative of the groups that they identify with. Preliminary data suggests that is what happened with the Democratic voters who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, said Lilliana Mason, a professor at the University of Maryland who studies partisanship.

“Older voters who scored high on racial resentment were much more likely to switch from Obama to Trump,” Ms. Mason said. She believes that he successfully made a pitch to what she calls “white male identity politics,” convincing older, less-educated white voters that he would represent their interests.

Economic status, it turns out, is not so important in partisanship. “Class in American politics, rich vs. poor, is just not a very good predictor of party identification,” Ms. Lee said. For both rich and poor Americans, other identities take precedence.

“There are plenty of rich Democrats,” Ms. Lee pointed out. “There are plenty of Republican politicians who represent poor districts.”

That’s not to say that the parties don’t have major differences on economic matters. But, experts say, those differences matter more to elites than to rank-and-file voters.

That is why, for instance, Mr. Trump was able to win the G.O.P. nomination even though he broke with Republican ideology on economic matters like trade protectionism. His arguments played to white working-class voter identity, and that turned out to be a successful strategy even though it alienated many of the party’s leaders.

A Trump supporter at a campaign event last June in The Woodlands, Tex. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

But how voters choose their party is only one element of the story. The overlapping identities that underlie partisanship are also driving a form of polarization so strong that it is now essentially impossible for politicians, or the public, to avoid its influence.

How Identity Drives Polarization

In 2009, when Ms. Mason was still a graduate student, she had a “eureka” moment about American politics. “I stumbled across this social psychology article from 2002 that talked about what happens when multiple identities line up together,” she said in an interview. “There was all this social psychology literature about how it increases bias.”

The same, she realized, was true of partisan identity. Everyone has multiple identities: racial, religious, professional, ideological and more. But while those multiple identities might once have pushed people in different partisan directions — think of the conservative Democrats of old in the South or all the liberal Republicans in the Northeast — today it’s more common to line up behind one party. A white conservative who lives in a rural area and is an evangelical Christian is likely to feel that the Republican Party is the best representative of all of those separate identities, for instance. An African-American liberal who lives in a city and works in a professional job is likely to feel the same way about the Democratic Party.

Can this explain why American politics have become so polarized over the last several decades? Starting in 1980, the National Election Study, a long-running survey that tracks Americans’ political preferences, showed that Republicans and Democrats were growing apart: Each reported increasingly negative opinions of the opposing party. And other data showed that polarization was seeping into nonpolitical arenas, making Republicans and Democrats less likely to marry or be friends.

Ms. Mason decided to make that the focus of her doctoral thesis, and found much to support her hypothesis: Americans’ overlapping political identities were driving extreme polarization.



“The way I think of it is, imagine that the World Series also affected the N.C.A.A. and the Super Bowl and every other team you care about,” she said. “So as our identities line up with party identity, politics becomes more and more consequential.”

That may have been the key to Mr. Trump’s success in the 2016 election, she believes. “With Trump, if you can point to one brilliant thing he did, it’s that he as a politician, kind of for the first time, said ‘we’re losers.’ ” Social psychology research has shown that the best way to get people to defend their identity is to threaten it. By saying “we don’t win anymore — we’re losers — and I’m going to make us win again,” Ms. Mason said, Mr. Trump’s pitch to voters both created the sense of threat and promised a defense: a winning political strategy for the age of identity politics.

Wanting a Partisan Win, but Not a Policy One


But while those demands can affect policy, they are rooted in emotional attachments, not policy goals. “When we talk about being a sports fan, there’s no policy content related to that,” Ms. Mason said. “It’s just this sense of connection. And that’s powerful! It makes people cry. It makes people riot. There doesn’t really have to be any policy content for people to get riled up, and to be extremely committed.”

Ms. Mason, along with Leonie Huddy, a professor at Stony Brook University, and Lene Aaroe of Aarhus University in Denmark, conducted an experiment to test the importance of policy. They found that people responded much more strongly to threats or support to their party than to particular issues. They became angry at perceived threats to their party, and enthusiastic about its perceived successes. Their responses to policy gains and losses, by contrast, were much more muted.


Mr. Trump has insisted, for instance, that the F.B.I. investigation into his campaign staffers’ contacts with Russia is meaningless “fake news,” and that the real issue is whether President Obama wiretapped him before the election. (There is no evidence thus far that any such wiretapping took place.) And when the Republican health care bill failed despite Mr. Trump’s support, he at first blamed Democrats.


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