What's Killing Trump's Voters?
What's killing Donald Trump's voters?
That's my reaction to the highly disturbing health news that two Princeton economists have uncovered about a key slice of the billionaire presidential candidate's support base.
Since 1999, middle-aged white Americans with a high school diploma or less education have been dying in record numbers, according to Angus Deaton (a winner this year of a Nobel Prize) and his wife, Anne Case.
For example, the mortality rate for non-college-educated whites 45 to 54 years old increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014. By comparison, the death rate for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continued to fall steadily during the same period, as did the death rates for younger and older people of all races and ethnic groups.
Death rates for middle-aged, non-college whites in other wealthy countries also declined.
And the rate for middle-aged Hispanics is far lower than for middle-aged whites at 270 per 100,000.
That's a stunning reversal of earlier trends. Middle-aged blacks, to cite one example, still have a higher mortality rate -- 582 per 100,000, compared with 415 for all middle-aged whites -- but the gap is closing. In other words, blacks and Hispanics of all age brackets have been showing improvements in these pathological indicators. Middle-aged whites have not. Why?
Most of this rising mortality, says the Deaton-Case study, is driven by an epidemic of self-destruction: Suicides and substance abuse, particularly alcohol-related liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.
What's tougher to pin down is why. Deaton and Case have no clear answer, and that leaves plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to speculate.
What strikes me is how today's middle-aged, lower-income white Americans, wedged between the baby boomers and the millennials, make up the leading edge of a generation that came of age after the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s -- a big peace dividend of robust New Deal spending and high-paying, low-skill factory jobs.
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