Yale political scientist and associate CSAP director, Greg Huber, has co-authored a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences that examines whether demographic changes at the voting-precinct level caused an electoral shift in the 2016 election toward Donald Trump and his anti-immigration political views relative to past Republican presidential candidates.
In an interview with Yale communications writer, Mike Cummings, Greg Huber shares that he and his research team, “found no evidence that places that are growing more diverse are becoming more Republican or that increases in local immigrant populations generated support for Donald Trump. In fact, our results showed that if anything, these kinds of demographic changes were more likely to benefit his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.” Huber goes on to state that, “There are people who are very upset by increasing diversity and immigration. They just don’t appear to be living in places experiencing an increase in immigration. It does not appear to be a story about local contact.”