The Trump Draw: Voter Personality and Support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican Nomination Campaign

Activation: The Relevance of Personality in 2016

The behavioral effects of personality traits are not constant across all situations; instead, they are conditioned by aspects of the context (Funder, 2008; Mondak, Hibbing, Canache, Seligson, & Anderson, 2010). Tett and his colleagues (e.g., Tett & Burnett, 2003; Tett & Guterman, 2000) offer trait–activation theory to help understand the interplay between traits and situations. They argue that strong personality effects are most likely in situations with two features. First, the situation must not constrain trait expression. As an example, we can contrast the impact of variation in personality on the actions of individuals marching in a Halloween parade or social protest versus those marching in a military formation. The first two situations allow room for individuality, whereas the latter does not. Critically, a person’s actual personality does not change from one context to another; what varies is the opportunity for expression of that personality. Second, personality effects are most likely when something in the context expressly cues, or activates, people’s traits. Continuing with the example of marching, personality would matter more when protestors are encouraged to design and bring their own signs than when mass-produced signs are provided by organizers.

The 2016 Republican nomination phase did not constrain trait effects. To the contrary, the context created something of a decision-making vacuum with respect to other bases of judgment, thereby bringing an opportunity for voters’ psychological differences to play meaningful roles. Partisanship and ideology are inherently muted as forces in primary elections between copartisans, and the 2016 campaign was no exception. Even if this were not the case, partisanship and ideology likely would not have worked to Donald Trump’s favor given that he was neither the most Republican Republican nor the most conservative conservative in the field. In addition, Trump lacked political experience and he advanced little in the way of detailed policy proposals, making it unlikely that voters were attracted to him on those bases. ¹

The 2016 context not only paved the way for voter personality to matter but also encouraged voters to make personality-based connections with the eventual winner. Donald Trump’s campaign was about Donald Trump. Trump did not set out to sell voters on an ideological vision or a coherent menu of policies. He set out to sell voters on the Trump brand, depicting himself as bold, brash, decisive, and cantankerous, and he bet that voters would buy what he was selling. This goal was largely facilitated by media coverage that shifted focus from one Trump invective to the next, while minimizing substantive discussion of experience or policy proposals. We believe that this had the consequence of increasing the salience of personality effects in the choices of Republican primary voters, and our study is premised on the assumption that psychological dispositions would incline some voters to be attracted to the Trump persona, and others repelled. In other words, by interjecting his own personality into the campaign, Trump also brought the personalities of voters into play.

We are hardly the first observers to note that Donald Trump anchored his campaign in Trump the person, and especially in Trump the personality. Trump put his personality front and center, and he did so in a manner designed to connect with voters on a personalistic, emotional level. Analysts have employed the framework of a “charismatic leader” to help in dissecting the Trump candidacy, and have utilized the related frame of a “cult of personality.” ² The campaign was about Trump’s personality, the voter’s personality, and the forging of a connection between the two. Trump diverted attention from conventional political criteria for candidate evaluation, and steered attention toward personality. Moreover, patterns in media coverage of the Trump candidacy magnified this focus on personality. In line with the tenets of trait–activation theory, the context is decidedly one in which personality effects can be expected.

Direction: Personality, Interpersonal Affinity, and Candidate Preference

The personality traits of voters will matter for candidate preference only if there is something systematic, whereby voters with high values on a personality trait consistently differ from voters with low values on that trait in how favorably they assess a candidate. In short, personality effects presuppose that individuals’ traits offer direction to their preferences. In the case of Donald Trump in 2016, we argue that any impact of personality traced largely to a dynamic whereby congruence fostered affinity. Voters who, in terms of personality, saw something of themselves in Trump would have been more likely to support him. Conversely, voters with a different personality profile would have been more prone to opt against him.

Homophily is the notion that individuals with shared attributes tend to be drawn toward one another; in short, likes associate with like. Congruence in personality appears to be one factor that brings people together. Evidence for this claim was first generated in the 1960s (Byrne, Griffitt, & Stefaniak, 1967; Izard, 1960, 1963). Subsequent research focused on the Big Five has found that people tend to select as friends individuals who are similar to themselves with respect to openness to experience, extraversion, and agreeableness (Selfhout et al., 2010), and that, at least for extraversion, this pattern extends to broader social networks (Feiler & Kleinbaum, 2015). Research regarding why personality-based homophily may exist has considered the matter from the perspective of evolutionary biology. The logic is that personality similarity in nonkin relationships may foster greater reliability and cooperation. In a key test of this, personality similarity was observed in chimpanzee friendships (Massen & Koski, 2014).

That personality similarity is seen in friendships does not assure that it will be observed in other relationships. People who view themselves as low in conscientiousness still likely prefer conscientious surgeons and pilots. Disagreeable managers presumably know to hire agreeable sales personnel. Neurotics may be disinclined to surround themselves with fellow neurotics. Hence, it is uncertain whether to expect voters to gravitate toward candidates with personality traits similar to their own, and especially whether to expect affinity effects for all traits. At the macro level, congruence exists between the personality profiles of party leaders and partisans in the mass public (e.g., Caprara, Barbaranelli, Consiglio, Picconi, & Zimbardo, 2003; Dietrich, Lasley, Mondak, Remmel, & Turner, 2012). However, unpacking why this congruence exists is no easy task (Caprara & Zimbardo, 2004), and it may be that personality is coincidental to party and candidate preferences. Citizens and elites who identify with a liberal party both may be high in openness to experience, but be drawn together due to their shared values and policy stances rather than their shared psychological dispositions.

Although we make no claim that the present study’s analyses will be definitive, we do see evaluations of Donald Trump during the nomination campaign as an excellent test case. Given, as argued above, that situational factors muted nonpersonality criteria and cued Trump’s personality, the context is conducive to personality effects. Our contention is that voters’ personality traits positioned some in the electorate to favor Trump and some to oppose him, and did so in a manner that had little or no overlap with conventional political and demographic predictors of candidate preference.

Differentiation: Voter Personality and Relative Assessments of Candidates

For voter personality to have mattered to the outcome of the 2016 Republican nomination campaign, it is not enough for voters to have seen a personality connection between themselves and Donald Trump. Instead, such connections also must have served to help voters differentiate between Trump and the remainder of the field. At face value, such differentiation seems possible. The other Republicans perhaps were not cut from the exact same psychological cloth as one another, but nor were they a patchwork of cotton, silk, hemp, and yarn. Voters’ psychological dispositions may not have taken them very far toward choosing among the likes of Carson, Cruz, Kasich, and Rubio, but those same dispositions may have helped tremendously in choosing between any of those candidates and Donald Trump. At question is whether voter personality as represented by the Big Five corresponds with the perceived favorability of Donald Trump relative to his major opponents, and whether personality influenced vote preferences across the entire Republican field. Hence, in crafting expectations, our task is to gauge whether and how scoring high or low on each of the Big Five traits would incline a voter to view Trump as compared with the others.

As noted above, research on personality congruence has identified affinity effects for openness to experience, extraversion, and agreeableness. Drawing on that research, we see a clear rationale for expectations with respect to those traits. Similar reasoning supports expectations for a conscientiousness effect. Neuroticism stands apart from the other Big Five traits, and requires a separate rationale for a possible impact on candidate preference.

People who are high in openness to experience are inquisitive, reflective, and engaged by ideas. They exhibit a strong thirst for information. In our measurement below, they are analytical. ³ On this trait, we see grounds for clear differentiation between Donald Trump and his main opponents. Trump made it quite apparent in the campaign that he was not interested in wading through lengthy policy appraisals or compilations of facts and data. He placed his trust in his own instincts. In Trump’s view, more time on homework does not make for a better president. As others have observed, “the persona [Trump] has adopted for his political career is a textbook example of low Openness. Trump’s communication during the campaign has been consistently simple, concrete, and straightforward” (Owens, 2016). ⁴ Empirical evidence supports this conjecture. Owens (2016) notes,

Back in 2008, YouGov asked people a number of questions that identified their preferences on the Big Five personality inventory. Three years later, it asked those same people what they thought about Donald Trump . . . People who scored lower on Openness rated Mr. Trump more than 20 percentage points higher than those who scored higher on Openness.

In sharp contrast, Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, and Bush are, to varying extents, detail-oriented policy wonks. Cruz’s self-confidence emanated from his belief that he possessed a superior intellect. Kasich and Bush seemingly reveled in the discussion of policy detail, and exhibited self-assurance that, case by case, they could think and work their way through to policy success. Rubio expressed ideological coherence and reasoned policy positions. Carson was not as detailed on policy as the others, but he projected a thoughtful and pragmatic demeanor, and his experience in neuroscience signaled a respect for analytical rigor. Looking at this choice set, voters who rated themselves as analytical should have gravitated toward any or all of Trump’s opponents, and found Trump’s disdain for information to be unsettling. Conversely, voters scoring low in openness (by our measure, individuals who were self-rated as unanalytical) should have appreciated Trump’s action-oriented, bottom-line persona. ⁵

Our strongest expectation pertains to extraversion. Extraverted voters will see Trump, a man routinely described as possessing “sky-high levels of Extroversion” (Owens, 2016), as being very much one of their own, and perhaps as their ideal for the modern political leader. Even by the standards of Washington, New York, and Hollywood, Donald Trump is bold and brash. Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, Bush, and Carson simply dull in comparison. Differentiating between them and Trump on this trait is an easy task. If congruence between voters and candidates with respect to extraversion prompts affinity, voters scoring high in extraversion should report more favorable assessments of Donald Trump than any of his top opponents.

We also see a strong case for an agreeableness effect. Donald Trump was unapologetically caustic throughout his candidacy, repeatedly boasting that he would speak what was on his mind, tell it like it is, and reject political correctness. Terms such as “kind,” “polite,” and “sympathetic” do not describe him. As psychologist Dan McAdams observed, “Across his lifetime, Donald Trump has exhibited a trait profile that you would not expect of a U.S. president: sky-high extroversion combined with off-the-chart low agreeableness” (McAdams, 2016). Trump’s disagreeableness most likely differentiated him more from some of his Republican competitors than from others. Kasich, Bush, and Carson genuinely seemed to be fundamentally agreeable. In contrast, many of Ted Cruz’s colleagues in the U.S. Senate reportedly view him as abrasive, and people who knew Cruz during his college years have expressed similar sentiments. Rubio occasionally spoke in strong tones, and he briefly attempted to match Trump insult-for-insult. But even at their worst, Cruz and Rubio maintained at least hints of decorum and civility, distinguishing them from Trump. The bottom line is that voters who rate themselves high in agreeableness should have warmed to the others, even if to varying degrees, while distancing themselves from Donald Trump. Hence, our expectation is that individuals scoring high in agreeableness will report more negative assessments of Trump than of his major competitors, and especially of Trump relative to Kasich, Bush, and Carson.

Prior research on personality congruence has not focused on conscientiousness, but we see grounds for a conscientiousness effect in the political realm. This trait dimension includes the facets of competence, order, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, and deliberation. Retrospective assessment of Donald Trump on conscientiousness is not a straightforward task, particularly for analysts who may not, themselves, have been part of Trump’s potential base back in early 2016, and who are contemplating Trump years after our data were gathered, and years after much more about Trump has been learned. For such critics, many of President Donald Trump’s behaviors while in office reasonably might be seen as near-perfect exemplars of the seven deadly sins, and certainly as indicators of a relative lack of conscientiousness. While acknowledging the validity of such appraisals of President Trump, we argue that a starkly different depiction is more appropriate for candidate Trump, especially very early in the 2016 nomination phase.

Our contention is that, particularly in the months leading up to the 2016 primary campaign, Donald Trump persistently endeavored to portray himself as high in conscientiousness, and, further, that he wrapped himself in the trappings of near every subsidiary facet associated with this trait dimension. Our corresponding hypothesis is that this depiction resonated with the Republican primary electorate, and, due to an affinity effect, that it resonated especially strongly with those voters who viewed themselves as high in conscientiousness.

What actions support our claim that Donald Trump depicted himself as being high in conscientiousness? Trump expressed unflinching confidence in his competence, repeatedly asserting not only that he would succeed in all policy domains but also that only he could solve the nation’s problems. Furthermore, Trump defined himself in terms of law and order. He railed against illegal immigration, and promised to round up and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. He assured voters he would stop violent crime in Chicago within 1 week. He vowed to lock up “crooked Hillary.” He said that, as an outsider, he would not be corrupted the way conventional politicians are, and that he would “drain the swamp.” At the Republican convention, Trump reiterated a common theme from his primary campaign, promising that the morning after his inauguration, “Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced.” Trump also characterized himself positively in terms of achievement striving and self-discipline. Trump boasted of how, through hard work and unparalleled skill and intellect, he had become a self-made billionaire. Trump bashed “low-energy” Jeb Bush, and said, as president, he himself would not leave the White House, would not take time off, and would not take vacations, all because there was too much work to be done. We argue that every bit of this speaks to conscientiousness. Donald Trump expressly and consistently portrayed himself to his possible supporters as an individual who, facet by facet, epitomized conscientiousness.

For readers who may be hesitant to accept the possibility that the most conscientious members of the Republican electorate in early 2016 were drawn to Donald Trump partly because they believed his self-depiction, we suggest that any final judgment be suspended until the results are in. There are, of course, three basic possibilities: that conscientious voters disproportionately supported Trump (our hypothesis); that conscientious voters disproportionately rejected Trump (which might occur if the voters evaluated Trump not on the basis of his self-depiction, but instead on the basis of his track record in matters such as bankruptcies); or that conscientiousness is unrelated to Trump support. If our hypothesis is supported, we see an affinity effect as the most plausible mechanism. In contrast, it would seem nonsensical that conscientious voters would throw strong relative support to Trump while viewing him as an irresponsible and incompetent charlatan who falsely depicted himself as conscientious. Conscientious voters should not have an affinity for candidates they view to be lacking in conscientiousness.

Of the Big Five, neuroticism is the most challenging when it comes to crafting expectations for candidate preference. Research on affinity does not identify effects for neuroticism. This is unsurprising, given that it is hard to envision that many individuals prefer to surround themselves with emotional chaos rather than emotional stability. A further complication is what to make of Donald Trump on this trait dimension. Although Trump is not a worrier, we would be hard-pressed to label him as emotionally stable. To the contrary, there is something of a cottage industry surrounding efforts to diagnose Trump’s various purported psychoses. Moreover, much of the anti-Trump messaging in both the primaries and the general election surrounded the notion that Trump was a cause for worry: that he was erratic, unpredictable, inexperienced, too risky to be trusted as commander-in-chief, and so on. That framing offers the basis for a possible Trump effect: If Trump, unique among the Republican field, should have caused nervousness among voters, then voters who themselves are most prone to worry should have assessed Trump relatively unfavorably. Thus, Trump’s supporters should be drawn from the ranks of the emotionally stable—people who never worry would not worry about Trump. Like the other Big Five traits, we see a basis for differentiation with respect to neuroticism. What differs about this trait is that, unlike the other four, the expected personality connection is not rooted in affinity.

It is when seen in its totality that the case we have articulated here takes on its full significance. If our expectations gain empirical support, the implication would be that Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination partly because nomination campaigns provide opportunities for personality to matter, partly because Trump himself put his persona front and center, and, critically, partly because he was the only Donald Trump in the race. Our argument is that Trump was essentially alone in speaking to the less open, more conscientious, more extraverted, less agreeable, and less neurotic portion of the Republican electorate, whereas Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, Bush, Carson, and the rest were left to divide the flip side.