Trump is supported by men who sell their social status short — As well as those who oversell
by Lucy Belknap (class of 2025)
Since Trump’s 2016 election, political scholars have been attributing his political success to Americans’ fears of status loss. These researchers argue that these fears come from not just economic insecurity, but also more subjective and symbolic feelings of slipping group dominance and cultural displacement. This work focuses particularly on status loss felt by historically dominant groups like white people, Christians, and men.
But how can we operationalize and measure status anxiety? One option is to ask people what they believe their relative social status to be by inviting them to place themselves on a 10-point scale representing our hierarchical society according to their social and economic standing. If people who historically reside at the top of the scale place themselves low, then this might indicate that they perceive their position as insecure or dropping. This low subjective social status has been found to predict support for radical right parties across 12 developed democracies, including among white people in the US.
I tested this measure and its ability to predict support for Trump in 2024 across all demographics in a national survey conducted by the Tufts Public Opinion Lab last month. In this survey, I asked respondents to “imagine a ten-point scale representing US society, where each American can be placed based on their social and economic standing relative to others. If 1 represents the bottom and 10 represents the top, where would you place yourself on this scale?” I expected that, aligning with previous research, traditionally high-status individuals who placed themselves low on the subjective social status scale would be more likely to have voted for Trump last November. I focused on gender as the division between typically high- and low-status individuals, given the significant gender gap in support for Trump and his advocacy for a dominant and regressive form of masculinity that directly addresses the status anxiety felt by men.
Looking at the data, both men and women placed themselves across the full range of the 10-point scale in very similarly shaped distributions. However, the median subjective social status among women, 5, is a point below that of men at 6. This makes sense given women’s historically lower status relative to men, which is enforced by unequal social norms as well as correlations with other indicators of status like employment and income.
Using this data, I tested whether there was a relationship between subjective social status and support for Trump among men and women. There was no significant relationship between these two variables among women, but interestingly, I found that there is a significantly positive relationship among men — the opposite of what I expected based on existing research. In other words, the higher that men rate themselves on the social status scale, the more likely it is that they voted for Trump in 2024.
There are a few causes that might produce this result, one of them being that those who support Trump do still objectively hold high status despite feeling that this status is threatened. However, another is that with Trump now back in office and promising to protect the existing social hierarchies, people’s responses might look different from the past. Instead of leading people to place themselves lower as an expression of their status anxiety, Trump’s assurances might heighten their tendency to place themselves higher on the social scale as an affirmation of their belief in their deservingness of high status and an expression of their desire to maintain it. As a result, those who place themselves higher are the ones who support Trump.
However, subjective social status does not tell the whole story alone — it becomes more illustrative when compared to more objective measures of social status, allowing us to see whether an individual’s subjective perception of their status is an over- or underestimation of reality. Gender is one dimension of this objective status, but another is income. In order to factor in income, I split respondents into 10 ranks based on household income percentile (e.g. 1 = below the 10th percentile, 10 = between the 90th and 100th percentile). Income percentile and subjective social status are only loosely related, with correlation coefficients of 0.37 among men and 0.16 among women, suggesting that people’s placements of themselves are only partly tied to economic standing.
To assess the extent to which people over- or underestimated their status relative to their income, I created a measure that subtracted income percentile ranking from subjective social status. Based on this measure, a positive number indicates overestimation of status relative to income, or perceiving one’s status to be higher than it would be based on income alone, while a negative number indicates underestimation of status relative to income, or perceiving one’s status to be lower than it would be based on income alone. The distribution of this distance measure is again fairly normal among both men and women, with distances ranging from -7 to 9 — in other words, some respondents placed themselves at a point on the status scale that was 7 points below their income percentile ranking, while others placed themselves 9 points above their income percentile ranking.
How does this distance measure relate to support for Trump in the 2024 election? In testing this relationship by gender, I found that among men, high support for Trump is associated with greater underestimation of status relative to income, in line with previous research, but also with greater overestimation of status relative to income, which is contradictory. This may be because, again, there are two responses that may be triggered when asked this question. One is to express frustration with diminishing status by perceiving it as lower than the objective truth, as previous literature has focused on, but the other is to express confidence in one’s status and denial that it is under threat by perceiving it as higher than the objective truth. The latter is even more likely to be a possibility when Trump is in office.
Meanwhile, among women, the opposite is true — reporting a social status that is substantially different from one’s income level is instead associated with low support for Trump. Though not pictured here, these tendencies are indeed associated with high support for Harris instead. The same explanation I applied to men may work here in the opposite direction — perhaps women who want to support a candidate who stands for gender equality may voice this opinion by reporting their status as disproportionately low to express frustration, or disproportionately high to express optimism.
This trend was stable across all income levels. Even after separating the sample into those above and those below the median annual household income in the US, which is roughly $80,000, I found the same pattern across both subsamples. While low-income individuals are generally more likely to overestimate their status relative to income and high-income individuals are generally more likely to underestimate, the overall trend among both groups is the same: men who over- or underestimate their status relative to income are more likely to support Trump, whereas women who over- or underestimate their status relative to income are more likely to oppose him. The stability of this trend confirms that these two conflicting status estimation tendencies do not come from opposite ends of the income spectrum, but rather are universal across all income levels.
Overall, these findings suggest that there is more to the story in terms of the relationship between status anxiety and support for the radical right and Trump specifically. Status anxiety may be expressed in very different ways — it might look like frustration, but it also might look like optimistic denial. The likelihood of this optimistic response is especially heightened by Trump’s return to office, where his supporters may believe he will now address their status-related fears. This possibility is crucial to consider when thinking about how to best construct measures of status anxiety — focusing exclusively on expressions of frustration or pessimism may lead us to miss other attitudes that might predict support for a politician like Trump. Our understanding of status threat may need some rethinking when those in office vow to protect status above all else.
