How Trump Won
The Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class cleared the space for Trump.
Voter suppression in Wisconsin might have been enough. FBI director James Comey’s eleventh-hour letter almost certainly was.
.. More poor and lower-middle-class people voted Republican in this election than the last. More upper-middle-class and rich people voted Democrat. And union voters abandoned the Democrats dramatically... Obama won only voters with household incomes under $50,000, but he did it overwhelmingly, 60–38, and lost all higher-income groups — a class warrior after all!
.. But go over $100,000, and things get interesting again. Romney won those well-off voters handily, 54–44, as Republicans generally do. Trump barely hung on at about 48–47. That’s a nine-point gain for the Democrats.
.. Trump did about the same as Romney among white voters: 58–37 for Trump versus 59–39 for Romney.
.. Romney beat Obama 52–45 among men, while Trump beat Clinton 53–41. Obama beat Romney 55–44 among women, and Clinton got 54–42 among them — about the same as Obama. Clinton seems to have lost some non-Republican male voters to Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, but not much else changed.
.. But Trump’s campaign made race salient in a distinctive way, which neither Romney nor McCain ever did, and may have sounded a bell of white identity politics that simply no one had rung before him. It may both have driven away richer voters and attracted poorer whites.
.. For people in the Fox/Breitbart right-wing information ecosystems, Trump exaggerates sometimes, but Clinton is a liar and crook. A chunk of those voters are working people who, fifty years ago, might have been getting their basic political information from a union, and are now getting it from a conspiracy-minded far right that convinced them they had a civic duty to vote against the corrupt liar in the race.
.. A focus on the economic numbers doesn’t imply a crude “class > race” argument. No serious person could pretend that Trump’s appeal was racially innocent. After the campaign he ran, a vote for him had objective racist meaning in a way that was different from a Romney vote in 2012.