This course explores one of the most unanticipated events in modern political history: the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States of America. We ask three basic questions: How did Trump win? Where (and whom) did he win? And why did he win? We devote equal time to each of these questions, breaking them down into 15 weekly topics. Each week starts with a primer article, followed by additional readings, data sources, and tools for further exploration.Beginning with the question of how, we survey readings that explain different voting patterns and which campaign strategies mattered most, along with other sources that offer up points for debate about the electoral process that brought Trump to power. Turning to the questions of where and whom, we move on to readings that map not just the state of Red State America, but also what has been called “the geography of despair,” the hollowed-out middle of Rust Belt and rural America where Trump gained enough slim victories to capture the presidency. Finally, we tackle the vexing debates about why Trump won. Was it a longing for an authoritarian leader? Racial resentment? Economic anxiety? Disgust for out-of-touch elites? All of the above? None of the above? Students, by engaging the readings and sources in this last part of the course, will answer these important questions for themselves.

Students will finish the course with a deeper understanding of this singular event and find themselves equipped with the knowledge and facts required to consider its implications for their own generation and for generations to come.

 

(Note to Reader: we tried to not duplicate readings that were included in some previous Trump syllabi, here and here. These other syllabi were prepared before the 2016 election and serve as excellent resources for anyone seeking greater historical and philosophical depth and more primary sources than we offer here.)

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PART ONE: HOW TRUMP WON

 

WEEK 1: Who Voted and How?
Making Sense of Electoral Returns

 

Primer

• Thom File, “Who Votes? Congressional Elections and the Electorate: 1978–2014,” US Census Bureau (July 2015)

Primary Readings

• Michael S. Lewis-Beck, William G. Jacoby, Helmut Norpoth, and Herbert F. Weisberg, The American Voter Revisited (University of Michigan Press, 2008)
• Sidney Verba and Norman H. Nie, Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality (1972; University of Chicago Press, 1987)
• Thomas B. Edsall, “The Democratic Coalition’s Epic Fail,” New York Times, November 10, 2016
• Mike Davis, “Not a Revolution—Yet,” Verso Books blog, November 15, 2016
• Kathleen Dolan, When Does Gender Matter?: Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections (Oxford University Press, 2014)
• Gabriel Sanchez and Matt A. Barreto, “In Record Numbers, Latinos Voted Overwhelmingly against Trump: We Did the Research,” Washington Post. November 11, 2016
• Jane Junn, “Hiding in Plain Sight: White Women Vote Republican,” Politics of Color, November 13, 2016

Data and Tools

• CNN Exit Polls: National, President (last updated November 23, 2016)
• American National Election Studies Data Center

 

WEEK 2: Misinformation Nation:
Digital Politics, Fake News, and Social Media Bots

 

Primer

• Pew Research, “Many Americans Believe Fake News Is Sowing Confusion,” December 15, 2016

Primary Readings

• Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988)
• Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (2000; The New Press, 2015)
• Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions,” Political Behavior, vol. 32, no. 2 (2010), pp. 303–30
• James H. Kuklinski, Paul J. Quirk, Jennifer Jerit, David Schwieder, and Robert F. Rich, “Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship,” Journal of Politics, vol. 62, no. 3 (2000), pp. 790–816
• Bence Kollanyi, Philip N. Howard, and Samuel C. Wooley, “Bots and Automation over Twitter during the US Election,” Project on Computational Propaganda Data Memo 2016.4, November 17, 2016
• Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press, 2015)
• Daniel Kreiss, Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Data and Tools

• Politifact, Statements about Fake News
• PoliticalBots.org
• John Markoff, “Automated Pro-Trump Bots Overwhelmed Pro-Clinton Messages, Researchers Say,” New York Times, November 17, 2016
• Samuel Woolley and Phil Howard, “Bots Unite to Automate the Presidential Election,” Wired, May 15, 2016

 

WEEK 3: Blame Bernie?
Third Parties & Political Spoilers

 

Primer

• Amanda Skuldt, “Could a Third-Party Candidate Win the US Presidency? That’s Very Unlikely,” Washington Post, August 2, 2016.

Primary Readings

• Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
• Hans Noel, “Why Can’t the G.O.P Stop Trump?” New York Times, March 1, 2016
• Paul R. Abramson, John H. Aldrich, Phil Paolino, and David W. Rohde, “Third-Party and Independent Candidates in American Politics: Wallace, Anderson, and Perot,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 110, no. 3 (1995): 349–367
• Christopher J. Devine and Kyle C. Kopko. “5 Things You Need to Know About How Third-Party Candidates did in 2016,”Washington Post, November 15, 2016

Data and Tools

• Real Clear Politics: 2016 Election Results
• Frank Newport, “Americans Less Interested in Two Major Political Parties,” Gallup, January 12, 2015

 

WEEK 4: The Road to 270:
Understanding & Exploiting the Electoral Map

 

Primer

• Jonah Engel Bromwich, “How Does the Electoral College Work?,” New York Times, November 8, 2016

Primary Readings

• Eitan Hersh, Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
• Josh Pasek, “Predicting Elections: Considering Tools to Pool the Polls,” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 2 (2015), pp. 594–619
• Robert Bond & Solomon Messing, “Quantifying Social Media’s Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook,” American Political Science Review, vol. 109, no. 1 (2015), pp. 62–78
• Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen, “The Rules of the Game: A New Electoral System,” New York Review of Books, January 29, 2017

Data and Tools

• US Electoral College: Historical Election Results, National Archives and Records administration
• National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

 

WEEK 5: Politrix?
Voting Rights—& Wrongs

 

Primer

• Suevon Lee and Sarah Smith “Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know about Voter ID Laws,” Pro Publica, March 9, 2016

Primary Readings

• Lorraine C. Minnite, The Myth of Voter Fraud (Cornell University Press, 2011)
• Stephen Ansolabehere and Nathaniel Persily, “Vote Fraud in the Eye of the Beholder: The Role of Public Opinion in the Challenge to Voter Identification Requirements,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 121, no. 7 (2008), pp. 1737–1774
• Matt A. Barreto, Stephen Nuño, and Gabriel Sanchez, “The Disproportionate Impact of Voter-ID Requirements on the Electorate—New Evidence from Indiana,” PS: Political Science and Politics, vol. 42, no. 1 (2009), pp. 111–116
• Marjorie Randon Hershey, “What We Know about Voter-ID Laws, Registration, and Turnout,” PS: Political Science and Politics, vol. 42, no. 1 (2009), pp. 87–91
• Lonna Rae Atkeson, Lisa Ann Bryant, Thad E. Hall, Kyle Saunders, Michael Alvarez, “A New Barrier to Participation: Heterogeneous Application of Voter Identification Policies,” Electoral Studies, vol. 29, no. 1 (2010): 66–73

Data and Tools

• Voter Identification Requirements | Voter ID Laws, National Conference of State Legislatures
• Changes in State Voting Laws, Swathmore College

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PART TWO: WHERE TRUMP WON

(in which we map the geography of despair and learn about those who live it)

 

WEEK 6: Red State vs. Blue State

 

Primer

• “Where Trump and Clinton Won,” Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2016

Primary Readings

• Andrew Gelman, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (Princeton University Press, 2009)
• Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart (Houghton Mifflin, 2008)
• Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger & Mourning on the American Right (New Press, 2016)

Data and Tools

• Josh Katz, “‘Duck Dynasty’ vs. ‘Modern Family’: 50 Maps of the U.S. Cultural Divide,” New York Times, December 27, 2016

 

WEEK 7: The Geography of Despair:
Rural Ghettos & Small-City Blues

 

Primer

• Lazaro Gamio, “Urban and Rural America Are Becoming Increasingly Polarized,” Washington Post, November 17, 2017

Primary Readings

• Carol Graham, “Unhappiness in America,” Brookings Institute, May 27, 2016
• Osha Gray Davidson, Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto (University of Iowa Press, 1996)
• Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America (Beacon, 2010)
• Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life and an American Small Town (Bloomsbury, 2010)
• George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013)
• Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2015)

Data and Tools

• Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index
• Shannon M. Monnat, “Deaths of Despair and Support for Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election,” Pennsylvania State University, Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education Research Brief, December 4, 2016
• The Daily Yonder
• Center for Rural Strategies

 

WEEK 8: Rustbelt Revolt:
What’s the Matter with Wisconsin (& PA & MI too)?

 

Primer

• “The Geography of Recession,” New York Times, March 3, 2009

Primary Readings

• Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (Crown Forum, 2012)
• D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper, 2016)
• Katherine Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
• Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan, 2004)

Data and Tools

• Robert Kuttner, “Hidden Injuries of Class, Race, and Culture: The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of the Tea Party and Donald Trump,” American Prospect, October 3, 2016
• “The Geography of Government Benefits,” New York Times, February 12, 2012

 

WEEK 9: White Views of Blacks,
Immigrants, & the Poor

 

Primer

• Jens Krogstad, Jeffrey Passel, and D’Vera Cohn. “5 Facts about Illegal Immigration in the US,” Pew Research Center, November 3, 2016

Primary Readings

• Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
• Donald Kinder and Cindy D. Kam, Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
• Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla, and S. Karthick Ramakrishan. Framing Immigrants: News Coverage, Public Opinion, and Policy (Russell Sage Foundation, 2016)
• Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal, White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2015)
• Natalie Masuoka and Jane Junn, The Politics of Belonging: Race, Public Opinion, and Immigration (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Data and Tools

• “Immigration Explorer,” New York Times, March 10, 2009
• “Food Stamp Usage Across the Country,” New York Times, November 28, 2009
• John Gramlich, “Trump Voters Want to Build the Wall, But Are More Divided on Other Immigration Questions,” Pew Research Center, November 29, 2016
• Tyler Woods, “Seven Myth-Busting Facts on Undocumented Immigrants,” Urban Institute, March 24, 2016

 

WEEK 10: Whiteness, White People, White Grievances

 

Primer

• John Sides and Michael Tesler, “How Political Science Helps Explain the Rise of Trump: The Role of White Identity and Grievances,” Washington Post, March 3, 2016

Primary Readings

• Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (William Morrow, 1999)
• Linda Faye Williams, The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003)
• Kirby Moss, The Color of Class: Poor Whites and the Paradox of Privilege (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003)
• Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in 20th-Century America (Norton, 2005)
• Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Duke University Press, 2006)
• Jennifer Sherman, Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America (University of Minnesota Press, 2009)
• John Hartigan Jr., “Understanding Whiteness,” in Race in the 21st Century: Ethnographic Approaches (Oxford University Press, 2010)
• Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (Viking, 2016)
• Eric Knowles and Linda Tropp, “Donald Trump and the Rise of White Identity in Politics,” The Conversation, October 20, 2016

Data and Tools

• Center for the Study of White American Culture
• Nicholas Kristof, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” New York Times, August 30, 2014

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PART THREE: WHY TRUMP WON

(in which we review and compare the leading explanations)

 

WEEK 11: Authoritarianism? “Only I Can Fix It!”

 

Primer

• Amanda Taub, “The Rise of American Authoritarianism,” Vox, March 1, 2016

Primary Readings

• Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (Harper, 1950)
• Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
• Mark Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
• Alan Wolfe, “‘The Authoritarian Personality’ Revisited,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 7, 2005
• Matthew MacWilliams, “The Best Predictor of Trump Support Isn’t Income, Education, or Age. It’s Authoritarianism,” Vox, February 23, 2016
• Adam Enders and Steven Smallpage, “Racial Prejudice, not Populism or Authoritarianism, Predicts Support for Trump over Clinton,” Washington Post, May 26, 2016

Data and Tools

• “Former Supreme Court Justice Souter on The Danger of America’s ‘Pervasive Civic Ignorance’” (video), PBS NewsHour, September 12, 2007

 

WEEK 12: Economic Anxiety? “I’ll Bring Back Jobs!”

 

Primer

• John Sides and Michael Tesler, “How Political Science Helps Explain the Rise of Trump: It’s the Economy, Stupid,” Washington Post, March 4, 2016

Primary Readings

• Morris P. Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (Yale University Press, 1981)
• Doug Henwood, “Trash-o-nomics,” in White Trash: Race and Class in America, edited by Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (Routledge, 1997), pp. 177–192
• Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr, “The Myth of the Rust Belt Revolt,” Slate, December 1, 2016
• Andrew Cherlin, “The Downwardly Mobile for Trump,” New York Times, August 25, 2016
• Bethany Albertson and Shana Gadarian, Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Data and Tools

• “The Jobless Rate for People Like You,” New York Times, November 6, 2009

 

WEEK 13: Racial Resentment? Beyond Birtherism

 

Primer

• Michael Tesler, “Views about Race Mattered More in Electing Trump than Obama,” Washington Post, November 22, 2016

Primary Readings

• W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction (Harcourt, 1935)
• Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 1985)
• Thomas B. Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (Norton, 1992)
• Darrell Pinckney, Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy (New York Review Books, 2014)
• Christopher Sebastian Parker, “The Real Reason Trump Won: White Fright,” The Conversation, November 17, 2016
• Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (University of Chicago Press, 1996)
• Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card: Campaign Strategies, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton University Press, 2001)
• Michael Tesler, “The Spillover of Racialization into Health Care: How President Obama Polarized Public Opinion by Racial Attitudes and Race,” American Journal of Political Science, vol. 56, no. 3 (2012), pp. 690–704

Data and Tools

• Implicit Bias Test | Project Implicit
• American National Election Studies (ANES)

 

WEEK 14: Listen, Liberal!
Disdain for Urban, Coastal Elites?

 

Primer

• Michael Tesler and John Sides. “How Political Science Helps Explain the Rise of Trump: Most Voters Aren’t Ideologues,” Washington Post, March 2, 2016.

Primary Readings

• Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903; Free Press, 1976)
• Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1973)
• Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (Norton, 1995)
• David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Simon & Schuster, 2000)
• Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal! Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (Metropolitan, 2016)
• Gabriel S. Lenz, Follow the Leader? How Voters Respond to Politicians’ Policies and Performance (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
• Marc J. Hetherington, “Political Trust and its Evolution,” in Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 2004), 8–35
• Sunshine Hillygus and Todd G. Shields, The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Data and Tools

• “Do You Live in a Bubble? A Quiz,” PBS, March 24, 2016

 

WEEK 15: Globalism & Its Discontents?
Conservative Populism in America & Europe

 

Primer

• Jeremy Adelman, “Donald Trump Is Declaring Bankruptcy on the Post-War World Order,” Foreign Policy, November 20, 2016

Primary Readings

• Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)
• John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (Columbia Global Reports, 2016)
• Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2016)
• Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Belknap, 2016)
• Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Trumpian Uncertainty,” Project Syndicate, January 9, 2017

Data and Tools

• Timothy B. Lee, ed., “The Trans-Pacific Partnership, Explained,” Vox, July 25, 2016
• United States International Trade Commission, “Economic Impact of Trade Agreements Implemented Under Trade Authorities Procedures, 2016 Report”
• OECD, “Income Inequality Remains High in the Face of Weak Recovery,” November 2016