Abstract
President Donald Trump has often drawn parallels between himself and Andrew Jackson. Both ran as populist outsiders to the political establishment who said they would represent forgotten Americans whose concerns had been ignored by a corrupt Washington elite. In this chapter we examine the Jacksonian tradition in America and explore whether Trump and Jackson enjoyed similar geographic bases of support. We find that they did. The relationship between county-level voting in 1828 and 2016 was stronger than in all but one election up until the Sixth Party System began in 1968. Knowing how a county voted in 1828 also better predicts how it voted in 2016 than does knowing how it voted in 1976. We illustrate the connection between voting in 1828 and 2016 by examining a consummate Jackson-Trump county (Pike County, Kentucky) and a prototypical Adams-Clinton county (Hampshire County, Massachusetts).
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Notes
- 1.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-250th-anniversary-birth-president-andrew-jackson/, retrieved on December 23, 2017.
- 2.
https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls, accessed March 15, 2018.
- 3.
https://visithampshirecounty.com/explore/culture/the-five-colleges, accessed on March 3, 2018.
- 4.
https://visithampshirecounty.com/, accessed on March 3, 2018.
- 5.
https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF, accessed on March 3, 2018.
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Darmofal, D., Strickler, R. (2019). Clinton vs. Trump: Back to the Future?. In: Demography, Politics, and Partisan Polarization in the United States, 1828–2016. Spatial Demography Book Series, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04001-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04001-7_5
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