Many months after the election of Donald Trump, new data and research findings continue to provide fresh light on that critical historical moment. The main strand of this research is a search to understand who voted for each candidate, and what motivated their vote. The results are not entirely intuitive, increasingly complex, and, as pundits like Nate Silver have noted, surprising – and certainly not consistent with the prevailing opinion on election night.
In particular, there appears to have been a gradual reversal of election night consensus on the role and relationship of economic anxiety and “racial” anxiety, or anxiety of the “other,” in terms of motivation and voting patterns. CONT.
John A. Powell, UC Berkeley