In addition to the typical battery of demographic, horse race, thermometer-scale and policy questions, my poll asked a set of four simple survey questions that political scientists have employed since 1992 to measure inclination toward authoritarianism. Political pollsters have missed this key component of Trump’s support because they simply don’t include questions about authoritarianism in their polls. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened.” Authoritarians, he explains, are inclined to “obey.” They “rally to and follow strong leaders. Having conducted a national poll of 1,800 registered voters of varying political allegiance, MacWilliams reports that “education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate.” Edging out even “fear of terrorism,” one statistical variable rose to the top in McWilliams’s study as the distinguishing mark of a Trump supporter: authoritarianism, which, McWilliams noted, was “one of the most widely studied ideas” in the social sciences.
The author of this report, Matthew MacWilliams, is the founder of MacWilliams Sanders, a political communications firm, and he is also a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he is writing his dissertation about authoritarianism.
And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow. That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength-and his staying power-have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. In fact, I’ve found a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump-and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s authoritarianism. If I asked you what most defines Donald Trump supporters, what would you say? They’re white? They’re poor? They’re uneducated? You’d be wrong. Just a few months ago, in mid-January, 2016, the online magazine Politico published a report with the title: “ One Weird Trait that Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter.”
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