Two forces convulsing American politics found each other at President Trump’s rally in North Carolina this week: a sense of anxiety among white voters about their standing in a country that is growing more diverse, and a politician intent on stoking those worries. …
More than anything else, the rising salience of race helps explain which white voters defected to vote for Mr. Trump in 2016 and which did not. It even helps make sense of why white voters without a degree swung toward Mr. Trump, but white voters with a degree did not.
White voters began to see the parties through a more racialized lens with the election of Mr. Obama in 2008. The Obama presidency made many traditionally Democratic and often less educated white voters aware of the Democratic Party’s alliance with black voters; it implicitly called into question whether the party was for them.
Mr. Trump, in turn, has made more explicit that he leads the party defending white status. What’s most curious isn’t how voters have reacted to that, said Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, but that Republican Party elites and commentators have so swiftly shifted their rhetoric on racial and ethnic diversity, too. “To me, the mystery is the speed with which what seemed to be a set of well-established norms crumbled,” Mr. Hopkins said. CONT.
Emily Badger & Nate Cohn, New York Times