Leaders on the Democratic left who want to represent the have-nots face an obstacle: their own voters. …
Mark Muro, the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, analyzed the differences between those communities that supported Hillary Clinton and those that backed Donald Trump. The findings of Muro and Sifan Liu, a Brookings research assistant, suggest that Democrats who are calling for a return to progressive populism will encounter more hurdles than they expect.
In their Nov. 29 essay, “Another Clinton-Trump divide: High-output America vs low-output America,” Muro and Liu determined that:
The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity as measured by total output in 2015.
In other words, the Clinton counties are the ones in which the economy is booming; they are hardly fertile territory for a worker insurrection. CONT.
Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times