As luck would have it, I just happen to working on a project dealing with this specific issue. So, this isn't just fun: I'm getting paid for it!
Let's break this down:
The first two links (Vox, lulz) are basically the same thing -- i.e. an article about a study and the study itself (the first link).
The fourth link is a different study, while the fifth link is to a WaPo op-ed summarizing a third study.
Study #1: Abstract, with emphasis added.
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral college victory, journalists focused heavily on the white working class (WWC) and the relationship between economic anxiety, racial attitudes, immigration attitudes, and support for Trump. One hypothesized but untested proposition for Donald Trump’s success is that his unorthodox candidacy, particularly his rhetoric surrounding economic marginalization and immigration, shifted WWC voters who did not vote Republican in 2012 into his coalition. Using a large national survey we examine 1) whether racial and immigration attitudes or economic dislocation and marginality were the main correlates of vote switching, and; 2) whether this phenomenon was isolated among the white working class. We find a non-trivial number of white voters switched their votes in the 2016 election to Trump or Clinton, that this vote switching was more associated with racial and immigration attitudes than economic factors, and that the phenomena occurred among both working class and non-working-class whites, though many more working-class whites switched than non-working class whites. Our findings suggest that racial and immigration attitudes may be continuing to sort white voters into new partisan camps and further polarize the parties.
In the study's introduction, we get this, emphasis added again:
According to instrumental views of partisan change, the increased political attention to racialized issues (policing, immigration) during Obama’s tenure and the increased reliance on non-white voters is shifting the Democratic Party’s median position on issues away from the median white citizen’s position, resulting in white shifts towards the Republican Party as white voters update their partisanship to match their policy positions. According to identity-based conceptions of partisan change, the increased perception of the Democratic Party as a coalition of non-white voters is changing perceptions of where many whites feel they belong. There is evidence that both processes are occurring.
Finally, in the conclusion, we get the "money" graph:
Throughout this paper we presented evidence that Trump and Clinton’s candidacies and
campaign messages did likely have an effect on voting trends. White voters with racially
conservative or anti-immigrant attitudes switched votes to Trump at a higher rate than
those with more liberal views on these issues.
In sum, then, what we have is the conclusion that some, "non-trivial" number of voters switched to Trump from Obama because of race AND immigration.
Since we know the number of switchers to Trump = ~8 million voters; since we know that the authors of this study are very careful to use words like "some" "non-trivial" and "likely,"; since we know that an overwhelming majority of Americans favor enforcing current immigration laws more firmly; and since we know that regression models, being what they are, are reasonably easy to manipulate, even unintentionally: the conclusion that can be draw from all of this is that some people, probably far less than 1 million voters (given the dominance of immigration attitudes and the authors' unwillingness to suggest a larger percentage), switched to Trump because of race. And of those (given the authors' specific notation of the shift of "the Democratic Party’s median position on issues away from the median white citizen’s position,") we can probably assume that less than 500,000 voters switched because of their own changing racial attitudes.
That's not nothing (i.e. non-trivial), but it's not enough to draw the conclusion that Trump voters are racists (unless, of course, you work for Vox).
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The other Vox link (Vox, lulz) is a case study in making claims generally not supported by the studies cited:
e.g.:
Cathy Cohen have published the results of a new survey on these questions, with a focus on the 41 percent of white millennials who voted for Trump and the sense of “white vulnerability” that motivated them. The conclusion is very clear....
Actually, the conclusion is:
White millennials who scored high on the white vulnerability scale were 74 percent more likely to vote for Trump than those at the bottom of the scale.
racial resentment is the biggest predictor of white vulnerability among white millennials.
What this means, then, is that IF you happen to be a millennial, and IF you happen to believe that white are in a tough position, demographically, then it is more likely that you will A. vote for Trump and B. be motivated by racial resentment.
This is NOT the same as saying that millennials who voted for Trump were motivated by racial resentment, contra Vox. That's a common deception, based on willful misrepresentation of data and conclusions.
Make your way further down the article and you see that this is a pattern:
One paper, published in January by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, found that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology.
What this means is that if you take out the largest drivers of vote determinants -- i.e. party and ideology -- then sexism or racism are likelier to determine vote choice than economic dissatisfaction. That's a vanishingly small population.
Another study, conducted by researchers Brenda Major, Alison Blodorn, and Gregory Major Blascovich shortly before the election, found that if people who strongly identified as white were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in 2042, they became more likely to support Trump.
So, if you're willing to tell a pollster you "strongly identify" as white, you will vote for the guy who proposes to enforce existing immigration law.
And a study, published in November by researchers Matthew Luttig, Christopher Federico, and Howard Lavine, found that Trump supporters were much more likely to change their views on housing policy based on race. In this study, respondents were randomly assigned “a subtle image of either a black or a white man.” Then, they were asked about views on housing policy.
These image-related studies have always been controversial and are nearly universally considered garbage.
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Moving on from Vox (lulz), the next study -- and the fourth link -- gives the game away in the abstract (emphasis added):
This experiment demonstrates that the changing racial demographics of America contribute to Trump’s success as a presidential candidate among White Americans whose race/ethnicity is central to their identity
Again, if your study looks only at white identitarians, then you're likely to find a group of people who are...well...white identitarians. Who knew?
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The third "study" -- and the fifth link -- sounds interesting. But it isn't a study. It's an op-ed about a book based on a study, a study comparing racial attitudes relative to economic news between the Bush and the Obama presidencies. None of which has anything to do with Trump. More to the point, the author, an associate professor of political science at the University of California at Irvine, gives us the following in his conclusion:
this doesn’t mean that economic anxiety has no influence on support for Trump. John Sides and I presented some preliminary evidence that economic insecurity was a factor in Trump’s rise.
Nor does it mean that racial resentment is the prime determinant of economic anxiety. It isn’t.
All things considered -- and Vox's typical simplistic misinterpretation notwithstanding -- this isn't exactly proof that Trump was elected because of racism. If anything, it all suggests that he
wasn't
What does seem to be a pattern, though, is that if you are a white identitarian or favor immigration restrictions, you would vote for Trump. That's not a good thing for Trump or the GOP, obviously, but it's a far cry from the consensus here.
