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Dentler et. al Working Paper, Sept. 2020 A Swing Vote from the Ethnic Backstage: The German American Role in Donald Trump’s 2016 Victory Klara Dentler (Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences, University of Mannheim; GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) Thomas Gschwend (Department of Political Science, University of Mannheim) David Hünlich (IDS – Leibniz Institute for the German Language; Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, University of Osnabrück) Abstract We question the growing consensus in the literature that European Americans behave as a homogenous pan-ethnic coalition of voters. Seemingly below the radar of scholarship on voting groups in American politics, we identify a group of white voters that behaves differently from others: German Americans, the largest ethnic group, regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. Using voting returns at the county level and leveraging ancestry group information from the US Census and the American Community Survey (ACS) we provide evidence for patterns that are not only related to partisanship but to characteristics which are particularly evident in the case of Donald Trump. German Americans traditionally support candidates with isolationist tendencies who challenge Washington as political outsiders. Other ethnic groups are far less attracted to these traits. Our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today, and should be taken seriously. Keywords: Ancestry, presidential election, Trump, American politics, outsider effect, assimilation 1 Introduction ‘Will German Americans make Trump President?’ During the run-up to the U.S. presidential election of 2016, several German news outlets shifted their attention to a large group of voters rarely recognized in the political behavior literature. Under the headline above, the newspaper Die Welt painted a scenario in which voters with German ancestry in several Midwestern states could be turning the tide in favor of the Republican candidate (Gersemann 2016). Focus Online, a prominent German online 1 Dentler et. al Working Paper, Sept. 2020 news resource posted a video explaining why German Americans living along the ‘German Belt’ between Pennsylvania and Oregon might be deciding the 2016 general election.1 Both analyses referenced an opinion poll by Morning Consult with more than 5000 Americans who had specified their ancestral affiliations. The poll showed that Americans of different European ancestries supported Trump to different degrees. German Americans favored him by a margin of 18% over Clinton, others also went against Clinton but lagged substantially behind in their support for Trump (Aldhous & Singer- Vine 2016). To date, there has only been a snap-shot inquiry into the phenomenon (Urlaub & Huenlich 2016). At the same time, Trump’s victory continues to raise the question whether “whites across the country developed a pan-ethnic racial identity” (Arbour 2018: 34) – especially in light of the pronounced racism exhibited by part of his constituency. In contrast to previous research, we provide evidence that leads us to question the existence of such a homogenous voter coalition. Moreover, we provide the first systematic post-election analysis of the distinctive role an estimated 46 million self- identified German Americans played for Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. The study fills a crucial gap not only because German Americans make up the largest ethnic group in the U.S. and are regionally concentrated in the ‘Swinging Midwest’. More importantly, what motivated the communities behind this statistic to vote for Trump in 2016, could also be playing a decisive role in the 2020 election and beyond. Through the lens of history, the most systematic factors in German American voting behavior appear to be twofold: the rural, communal conservatism on the one hand and the anti-establishment appeal of political outsiders with an isolationist agenda on the other hand. After taking a look at the historic presence and the political past of German Americans, we embed our study in the context of research on the remaining influence of white ethnicity in American politics (Sonnenshein & Valentino 2000, Gimpel & Cho 2004, Arbour & Teigen 2011, Arbour 2018). Using aggregated characteristics of seldom tapped data sources such as the US Census and the American Community Surveys (ACS) together with official voting returns at the county level, we follow three lines of inquiry. First, we provide evidence that supporting Trump in the voting booth can be attributed to the specific candidate instead of traditional conservatism in the German American community or a gradual realignment in favor of the Republican Party (Arbour 2018). Second, consistent with previous research that finds German Americans to have a historic record as swing voters in many regions (Kleppner 1970, Jensen 1971, Gimpel & Cho 2004), we show that counties with a large share of German Americans are also more likely to lay in States that voted for Obama 2012 but for Trump in 2016. When turning to counties in those swing states, we show that precisely those counties where German 1 https://www.focus.de/politik/videos/wahlen-in-den-usa-warum-die-deutsch-amerikaner-die-us- praesidentenwahl-entscheiden-koennten_id_6177921.html 2 Dentler et. al Working Paper, Sept. 2020 Americans dominate most were those most likely to switch their majority from Obama to Trump. Finally, while working with limited data on the county level, we probe a causal mechanism for a German American pro-Trump swing. While it is implausible to claim that German Americans supported Trump merely based on his German ancestry (as ‘one of their own’, so to speak), the communal experience of German Americans has promoted sympathies for political outsiders with isolationist tendencies, i. e. a protectionist and anti-interventionist outlook. The rallying cry “America First” was a cornerstone of Trump’s campaign. Though we cannot rerun history to come up with a reasonable counterfactual, we will show that candidates with a similar agenda benefited from the German American vote throughout the 20th century. Even Barack Obama made strong gains compared to other Democrats in German American regions when he stepped into the arena as a potential outsider with an anti-war record. Overall, our findings indicate that European American experiences of migration and integration still echo into the political arena of today, and should be taken seriously. 2 German ethnicity and its role in U.S. Politics Understanding how the specific German American experience transferred into political views that remain with many communities until today, requires historic dimension. During a substantial increase of immigration from Europe in the 19th century, close to 5 million new residents arrived in the U. S. from the regions that eventually formed the German Empire (Office of Immigration Statistics 2009: 6). At the time, the population from various regions of German-speaking Europe was more heterogeneous than other immigrant groups such as the Irish or Scandinavians. Yet, the world view of German Lutherans, Catholics and Jews was closely connected to their mother tongue. As German settlers played a crucial role during westward expansion, the reach of the German language soon extended across the country. By 1890, when the census collected systematic information on immigrant languages for the first time, German had been established as a language of instruction in numerous public and parochial schools from the East Coast to the Midwest. Bilingual programs and German instruction existed in 25 states, including Southern States such as Texas and Missouri (Buenger & Kamphoefner 2019, Kamphoefner 1994, Toth 1990). 796 of the 1170 foreign language newspapers in the United States in 1894 were in German, 97 of which were daily papers (Park 1922:310, Arndt & Olson 1976). By 1900, there were close to 9 million speakers of German, nearly 12 % of the total population – a proportion barely shy of the number of Spanish speakers in the U.S. today.2 2 This number is calculated by David Huenlich and Walter Kamphoefner using ancestry.com and the 2008 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (YIS, Office of Immigration Statistics 2009). Kloss (1966) offers the same estimate for 1910 which would be around 10 % of the population. Census data shows that the total population in 1900 was approximately 76,000,000. There were 6,509,166 permanent residents with two German-born parents, as well as an additional 615,933 residents with only a 3 Dentler et. al Working Paper, Sept. 2020 German political activism was split into many factions from secular revolutionaries to religious conservatives. At the same time, German Americans collectively occupied a cultural and political outsider role on several occasions. By and large, Germans stood for abolition and fought on the side of the Union during the Civil War. German-dominated counties in the South were known for their Unionist sympathies, and subsequently suffered increased discrimination in the years before, during and after the Civil War (Kamphoefner 1999, 2016). In the Midwest, German Lutherans and Catholics came into conflict with Pietistic interpretations of American Protestantism. Issues of contention were drinking habits and mother tongue schooling. When the Bennet and Edwards Laws in Wisconsin and Illinois in 1889 briefly introduced an English-only policy to the school system, the legislation met with fierce
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