Fear and the Vote: A Recent Poll Reveals a Worrisome Split

It could explain why so many in Trumpland crave a despot.

The Proud Boys. a neo-fascist group known to incite street violence, attend a rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington.  Photo: Luis M. Alvarez / AP

Buried in a recent poll by Economist/YouGov is a telling and troubling piece of data. In answer to the question, “Which comes closest to your view?” The two choices presented vastly different outlooks:

“Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals, and illegal immigrants and our priority should be to protect ourselves.” 

OR

“It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated.”

Most Independents and Democrats identified the second choice as the view they feel closest to. But among Republican voters, most chose the first. And among Trump voters, fully two-thirds felt the darker outlook comes closer to their own view.

It’s important to note that the notion that Trump voters are actually threatened by terrorism, crime and illegal immigration is false. Terrorism (except White Nationalist terror, which isn’t targeted at typical Trump voters) is down historically. So is crime, and so is illegal immigration. Native-born Americans in fact are more likely to commit crimes than undocumented immigrants.

This fear-based perception and world outlook is nonetheless constantly stoked by leaders like Trump and outlets like Fox News and more recently OAN and Newsmax. This keeps GOP voters living in a dystopian and false world where Muslim terrorists will kill them and illegal immigrants will rob their homes and rape their families.

The data also squares with another troubling statistic, one which political scientists have begun to examine more carefully in recent years given the recent rise of fascist ideologies, groups and leaders in America. It’s worth revisiting the conclusions of those studies in light of the worldview polarization now evident in our political divide.

In her important 2005 work, The Authoritarian Dynamic, political psychologist Karen Stenner posited that there is a certain percentage of the population in any society that has strong authoritarian leanings. So-called “authoritarian voters” have a more fearful worldview than the rest of the electorate. They want to impose order wherever they see dangerous change, and they gravitate toward leaders who would use force to stop those changes. They are willing to place a perceived level of safety and security above less important things in their minds, like elections and freedom of the press. Thus, authoritarian voters would readily cast aside democratic norms and place their trust in a strongman leader like Trump, or in the past Hitler and Mussolini. (Some experts warn against the use of the term “authoritarian voter” as connoting a fringe extreme, arguing that the tendency toward fascism is actually far more commonplace. Given the January 6th insurrection and the subsequent rallying to Trump by GOP voters, in my view the “authoritarian voter” is not fringe but rather quite mainstream within the GOP now.)

It also turns out, authoritarian voters are readily identifiable, even through simple personality surveys around their attitudes toward child-rearing. They comprise a startlingly high percentage of our population and likely always have. Indeed, among white voters, a Vox-Morning Consult survey showed that just under half of white voters in America scored “high” on measures for authoritarian voting, and one in five scored “very high.”

“Authoritarian voters” don’t just prefer a strongman leader. They prefer strongman tactics deployed to quash perceived threats to their safety and position in society. Thus, if they want to stop “illegal voting” (usually by minority voters), then using the military to seize ballot boxes is perfectly appropriate. If they fear Black Lives Matter protestors, then beating them and rounding them all up is just fine. If they want to “stop the steal” of a general election, martial law is the way to go.

Authoritarian voters are believed to carry these tendencies latently, activated in times of destabilizing change or perceived threat. The readiness by which Americans have trammeled the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens after traumatic attacks like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 comes to mind. These tendencies can also be stoked, however, by false threats to perceived security, something Trump managed well with his public attacks on immigrants and Muslims. 

Because the GOP rebranded itself in the 1960s as the party of law and order, one theory posits that authoritarians naturally began to gravitate towards it, and Trump was able to stir them into a frenzy beginning in 2015. Today, the GOP must grapple with dominant anti-democratic forces within its own ranks, creating a deep and possibly irreparable rift with traditional conservatives. The social instability of 2020, with both the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, likely fueled generalized fears of social disorder and pushed even more Americans over toward Trump than ever before, helping in part to explain why 74 million people voted for him, even if he seemed less likely to be able to solve these social problems.

In order to keep GOP voters loyal and within this useful yet fearful worldview, Fox News and alt-right media have had to invent ever more ominous threats to Trump voters—from Antifa, to alleged ballot harvesting, to trans people in their daughters’ bathrooms. Adding to this fire are the dangerous conspiracies of QAnon, which also use demonstrably false but heightened threats, including the chestnut of child sexual exploitation which gives license to and justifies almost any form of extreme action.

If we want to get at the heart of and root out support for authoritarianism, we will need to address the sources of the fears that are driving it. So long as conspiracy theories, the Big Lie of a stolen election, and rage-inducing right-wing propaganda continue to grow and spread, so will the grip that fascism has on our politics and society. This is why cutting off the megaphones of disinformation on social media from sources like Trump and QAnon, and holding companies like Fox News, OAN and Newsmax liable for defamation, is critical. Such actions stand the best chance of actually de-radicalizing Trump voters and ultimately releasing them from unfounded and intentionally fabricated fears.