… One question I’ve heard people ask since Clinton’s loss is how it can be about race if she lost states Obama won, and if Obama won more white voters than she did. This is not the puzzle many are making it out to be.
There’s a long and deep literature on racial priming that shows that when you make white voters think about their race, their political opinions shift right. …
Obama’s campaigns were studiously nonracial. In 2012, he and Mitt Romney both primed the electorate to think about businessmen versus workers, capital versus labor, makers versus takers. Obama won that election in part by making it about economic identity.
But Clinton, in part because she couldn’t rely on Obama’s natural connection to the nonwhite electorate, was much more explicit about the nature of her coalition, and the importance of fighting racial bias and white privilege in America. Donald Trump, for his part, made fears of the brown Other the centerpiece of his campaign from the day he launched his candidacy. CONT.
Ezra Klein, Vox