Thread by @crimkadid

Trump's 2016 primary campaign (not the general) had an ethnic angle that went largely untalked about. It revealed a cultural split in the American Midwest between the descendants of Germanic immigrants who hated his boastfulness and the descendants of Old Americans who loved it.

After the Iowa cacucus I fiddled around with a NCSS spreadsheet of Iowa counties and discovered that the % of county who identified as Dutch in the census was the best negative predictor of Trump’s vote count, more important even than the % of bachelor’s degrees.

There aren’t many Dutch people in America. Their highest concentration by far (57.7%) is in ultra-religious Sioux County Iowa which also gave Trump his lowest shared of the vote (10.9%, his average was 24.3%). Others have noticed the same thing: aei.org/op-eds/the-mos…

Dutch NW Iowa is famous for its religiosity and the people there functioned electorally sort of like Mormons, hating Trump for character reasons in the primaries but voting for him overwhelming in the general to save the Supreme Court (82.1%). nytimes.com/2015/12/17/ups…

There’s one heavily Dutch place (26%) in Iowa not part of the NW cluster called Marion County and Trump also did anomalously bad there, which I think rules out the possibility that is an artefact of something else. The Dutch, no matter where they are in Iowa, hated Trump.

But this isn't specific to the Dutch. The most German state in the country is Wisconsin and its most German portion is in the SE part of the state, with a salient extending into the center. Guess which counties Trump did crushed (Cruz in yellow here).

This religious Dutch disliked Trump, but so did the less evangelical Germans and overwhelmingly mainline Norwegians. Nate Cohn found that the best negative predictor of Trump’s share was the number of “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants”.

Now Cohn phrased that in the dumbest way possible, because one of the best predictors of Trump’s support was the number of self-identified “Americans”, who are also white Protestants. These are people who have been in the country so long they don’t know what they are.

This is the basic division that never mattered before 2016: between the Anglo-Saxon Midwest exemplified by Indiana and the Germanic one represented by Minnesota. Here on the left you can see the average British and Irish scores for 23andMe customers; note the Minnesota dead zone:

Minnesota was the only state lame enough to vote for Rubio. Iowa and Wisconsin went for Cruz and Ohio was a Kasich victory with Trump winning all the Southern, Appalachian counties with lots of Old Americans.

I’m fairly sure this is not genetically influenced, because heavily German Pennsylvania and East Texas didn’t display the same tendency. Ancient Pennsylvania Germans also didn’t turn against Wilson in 1916 or FDR in 1940; they’re just Americans who happen to have German blood.

Midwestern ethnics gave up their languages a long time ago, so this is a weird finding. It turns out that certain basic attitudes have remained unchanged in Midwestern ethnic ghettos even as the languages and food died out. What are they exactly?

I think the basic answer is that Trump is an affront to all things Protestant. Not the actual doctrine; there are certain deep religious folkways that have nothing do with the original founder of the religion or its Holy Book.

The Koran doesn’t insist women wear the veil, but it’s such a baked in Muslim practice that a lot of people assume it does. Likewise, there’s nothing about sola scriptura or justification by faith that naturally leads to the Protestant Modesty Cult, but that’s baked in, too.

Trump’s wiki used to have a quote from him to the effect: “People can’t believe I’m a Protestant” and that’s apt, because open braggadocio is so frowned upon in the Protestant North, the traditional backbone of the old school GOP.

Now Southerners are of course Protestants too, but not really in the European sense. The religion is too loud and charismatic; it has too much personality for a Scandinavian or a German to feel comfortable. It’s fundamentally a Protestant spinoff.

Trump basically ran as an old fashioned Democrat that drew support from the traditional alliance of Southerners and Northeast Catholics/urbanites in opposition to a stodgy Protestant culture of self-control.