There’s a reason Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign is trying so hard to appeal to nostalgia: Research I conducted with my collaborators Kirby Goydel and Paul Kerstedt has found that people who feel nostalgic—that is, those who yearn for the “good old days” of America—are more likely to vote for the Republican candidate in the 2022 midterm elections.
The first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention kicked off with a nostalgic message from Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who urged voters to support Trump and “make America the land of opportunity again.”
And in general, the themes for the 2024 Republican National Convention will be nostalgic: “Make America Good Again” on Monday, “Make America Safe Again” on Tuesday, “Make America Strong Again” on Wednesday and “Make America Great Again” on Thursday.
The American public is nostalgic. Through the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, a collaboration among many researchers and research groups, we surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults and found that about 54% of respondents to our question agreed that “the world used to be a better place.” Other questions we asked included, “How often do you feel nostalgic for the good old days of this country?” and “Do you think American culture and lifestyles have changed primarily for the worse or for the better since the 1950s?”
From their responses, we created a scale to measure how much nostalgia people feel for America’s past, and used this scale to explore the effect of nostalgia on people’s voting choices in the 2022 midterm elections.
Our findings show that the effect of nostalgia is most pronounced among independent voters.
In 2022, non-independents, or partisans, were staunch supporters of their respective political parties, regardless of their level of nostalgia. But independents with relatively low nostalgia, or no attachment to a political party, were 57% likely to vote Democrat and 40% likely to vote Republican. Meanwhile, independents with relatively high levels of nostalgia were 25% likely to vote Democrat and 74% likely to vote Republican.
Looking ahead to the 2024 general election, our findings suggest that nostalgic appeal may attract more independence-leaning swing voters to Republican parties.
Trump’s nostalgic appeal
As the number of Americans who disapprove of incumbent President Joe Biden reaches an all-time high, a New York Times/Siena College poll finds that nostalgia for the late 2010s is spreading.
President Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021 riot and response to the pandemic seem blips in comparison to the sustained economic growth he experienced during his three years in office from 2016 to 2019. Only 9% of voters say the riots or COVID-19 are what they remember most about Trump’s term, while 24% remember the economy. It’s no wonder that his presidential campaign is once again steeped in nostalgia.
Trump is using the same slogan, “Make America Great Again,” that he used officially during his 2016 campaign and informally during his 2020 reelection campaign. Both slogans in 2016 and 2020 referred to a vague, distant American past when things were better and simpler.
Now, there is a concrete element to the former president’s appeal. “Make America Great Again,” as expressed by the acronym MAGA, is a pledge to restore things to “the good old days” and the way things were under President Trump. The Trump campaign has made this connection clear. For example, its website lists the accomplishments of Trump’s first term and lists “rebuilding the best economy in history,” “ending crime and restoring safety,” and “restoring American strength and leadership” as top priorities for his next term.
Is it better than it was four years ago?
Presidential candidates often use nostalgia in their campaigns, and “Make America Great Again” was nothing new in 2016. It was a borrowing of Ronald Reagan’s “Make America Great Again” slogan from 1980.
Reagan made good use of nostalgia appeals. In 1980, he was running against an extremely unpopular incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, whose four-year term ended with the US economy in a much worse state than it had been in 1976. Inflation was at 13.5% and the economy was in recession.
During a debate with Carter, Reagan asked the audience, “Are things better off than they were four years ago?” The answer to Reagan’s question was clearly “no.”
Comparing the current situation to the recent past is a key element of democratic accountability. The act of voting is inherently retrospective, a judgement of past performance. Voters need to be able to hold a sitting president accountable.
But Trump nostalgia isn’t just about reminiscence: Trump’s appeal isn’t just about a past of economic good times and social stability — it evokes a time in America when women and minorities didn’t hold power.
Nostalgia as a Dog Whistle
In a recent paper published in Research & Politics, political scientists Kirby Goydel, Bradley Madsen and I found that feelings of nostalgia are strongly associated with sexism and racism.
Analysis shows that people with high nostalgia are 23% more likely than people with low nostalgia to agree with racist statements like the following: “The Irish, Italians, Jews and many other minorities have overcome prejudice and worked their way up. Black people should be able to do the same without receiving special favours.”
Similarly, nostalgic respondents were significantly more likely to believe that women are “prone to anger” and “seek power by dominating men.”
The link between nostalgia, racial resentment and hostile sexism is what makes Trump’s nostalgia appeal so powerful and so polarizing — not just for the past four years, or the Reagan era of the 1980s, but for a time before the civil rights and feminist movements gained momentum.
