White-on-White Voting

… The 2016 results suggest that residents of a diminishing number of decisively white American towns and small cities — even those which supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 — can now be politically mobilized around race, ethnicity, multiculturalism and immigration.

None of the nation’s whitest municipalities and counties — especially those in the Trump-voting Midwest — is immune.

Where are the overwhelmingly white localities experiencing the most rapid rate of minority population growth, although the absolute numbers themselves are small? They are in the part of the nation’s heartland — Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — where Trump earned enough Electoral College support to win the presidency even as he lost the popular vote. …

Trump’s anti-immigrant, racially loaded messages resonated most powerfully among voters living in the least diverse, most racially isolated white communities. It is in these locales, which are experiencing the earliest signs of minority growth, that anxiety over approaching diversity is strongest. CONT.

Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times