“If you set out to design a strategy to produce the lowest popular vote possible in the new American electorate of 2016, you would be hard-pressed to do a better job than Donald Trump has,”
.. Two national polls conducted this month have Mrs. Clinton catching up to Mr. Trump among men over all. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal pollshows Mrs. Clinton with 43 percent support among men to his 42 percent.
.. If Mr. Trump is only doing as well or worse than Mr. Romney did with white men, he will never make up the votes he is losing among women and nonwhites.
.. The data reveal a huge gap in those who have a college education and those who do not.
.. In fact, even if virtually all of the white, non-college-educated men eligible to vote did so, Mr. Frey found, Mrs. Clinton would still win the popular vote by 1.1 million.
.. And if Mr. Trump keeps alienating more of them like Gary Williams, a lifelong Republican and small-business owner from Lexington, Tenn., his base will continue to shrink. “He cusses in front of women and children and everybody else. He’s not a Christian. Everything about him makes me sick,”
The Pull of Racial Patronage
Alternatively, the more you favor a left-wing politics that stresses economic forces above all else, the more you’ll cast Trump’s blue collar support as the bitter fruit of the Democratic Party’s turn to neoliberalism
.. My sympathies are with the second group in both debates — as a partisan of a more solidaristic conservatism, and as an outsider who prefers the old left’s class politics to the pseudo-cosmopolitanism of elite liberalism today.
.. Eventually, we ended up with a liberalism that favors permanent preferences for minority groups, permanently large immigration flows — plus welfare programs that recent immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to use.
.. it still amounts to a system of ethnic patronage, which white Americans who are neither well-off nor poor enough to be on Medicaid see as particularly biased against them.
.. the gainfully employed but insecure lower middle class, is the Trumpian core.
.. By embracing white identity politics, they’re being bigoted but also, in their own eyes, imitative: Trump’s protectionist argle-bargle boils down to a desire to once again have policies that specifically benefit lower-middle-class whites — welfare for legacy industries and affirmative action for white men.
.. the absence of economic common ground between Hillary-voting white moderates and the party’s poorer, minority base means that her temporary coalition is likely to fracture first along racial lines.
That fracturing will help the G.O.P. recover, but it won’t help Republicans build a pan-racial conservatism. The pull of white identity politics can be overcome, but only with great effort.
Why Blacks Loathe Trump
This is the same Breitbart that the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to in an April “Hatewatch” report:
“Over the past year however, the outlet has undergone a noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas — all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”
.. “The Alt-Right is a loose set of far-right ideologies at the core of which is a belief that “white identity” is under attack through policies prioritizing multiculturalism, political correctness and social justice and must be preserved, usually through white-identified online communities and physical ethno-states.”
.. approximately one-fourth of the 3.3 million Muslims in this country are African-American. Indeed, the Muslim faith has deep roots in the black community because many Africans brought to this country as slaves were Muslims.
‘New Nationalism’ Amounts to Generic White-Identity Politics
The consensus that voters are revolting against economic conditions ignores other ways that they expect Trump to protect America.
In a fairly representative analysis, Politico’s Michael Hirsh explained the “new nationalism” as “a bitter populist rejection of the status quo that global elites have imposed on the international system since the Cold War ended, and which lower-income voters have decided — understandably — is unfair.”