There is a single significant trait that can predict if a voter supports Donald Trump or not. Yes, you heard right – one thing that can tell you if a person will vote for the man who may or may not be banned from the UK . It has nothing to do with if they came from a middle class background, nothing to do with if you went to boarding school or state, nothing to do with the factors you might have thought would determine this vote at all.
It’s Americans with authoritarian inclinations. Are your first thoughts: sorry what now? Ours too. There’s so many questions surrounding this ‘theory’, like how on earth can you tell if all Americans even have authoritarian inclinations in the first place?! Or why are these ‘authoritarian inclined Americans only voting for Trump? What strange power does he hold over them?
The survey, conducted by Matthew Macwilliams, was conducted in the last five days of December under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts. Sampling 1,8000 registered voters across the country, it ran a standard statistical analysis and found that the only two factors that played a part in who an individual voted for were authoritarianism, and a fear of terrorism. Are you confused? Because we are.
In short, people with such tendancies rally to and obey – so basically they like being told what to do by strong leaders. They don’t like outsiders and if they feel threatened they respond aggressively. So Trump’s tactic to ‘make American great again’ (cough bullshit cough) is encouraging those authoritarian people to vote Trump. We thought that by making sexist remarks about women that would be enough to stop anyone voting for him, but apparently not.
Now, we’re not entirely sure why or how this poll depicts an authoritarian person from a non-athoritarian person, but apparently political scientist Marc Hetherington found that authoritarianism mattered more than income, ideology, gender, age and education in predicting the outcome of say Hilary Clinton over Barack Obama. The trend supposedly started decades ago, so ya know it’s been around for a while even if this is the first we’ve heard of it.
So does this mean that Trump’s going to win? In Macwilliams results, Trump captured 43 percent of Republican primary voters who are also strong authoritarians and 37 percent of Republican authoritarians in total. That basically sounds like a sure win to us and we’re not sure how to think or feel about this outcome. Should we be scared? Probably yes. Are we going to be thrown into a poll that determines if we’re an authoritarian one day, maybe. Will Trump come out on top and this theory be proven 100% correct. We have no clue. But either way, check yourself for authoritarian qualities, you could be a secret Trump lover and if so, you might need help.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.