In rural parts of America, it wasn’t just white men who flocked to the polls on Election Day to vote for Donald Trump. Rural white women were right there in the voting lines with them. The NBC News national exit poll documented how Trump and his populist message disproportionately appealed […] Read more »
How the Election Revealed the Divide Between City and Country
The earthquake that elected Donald Trump has left the United States approaching 2020 with a political landscape reminiscent of 1920. Not since then has the cultural chasm between urban and non-urban America shaped the struggle over the country’s direction as much as today. Of all the overlapping generational, racial, and […] Read more »
The Story of the Suburbs
The media has paid a lot of attention throughout the campaign and afterward on rural and working-class white America. Not nearly as much attention has been spent on suburban America, whose college-educated white voters (especially white women) were supposed to provide Hillary Clinton a bulwark to big losses among the […] Read more »
How the 2016 Election Exposed America’s Racial and Cultural Divides
The 2016 election exposed an America of deep divides over race, ethnicity and culture — a nation carved into two large coalitions, roughly equal in size but radically different in demographics and desires. … The electorate coalitions in 2016 were similar to the 2012 election, with one major exception: white […] Read more »
How Trump redrew the electoral map, from sea to shining sea
America’s political geography follows the contours of its physical geography. The coasts are home to urban Democratic havens, while Republicans count on the vast and less densely populated areas that almost always support the ticket. The suburbs that sit in between can swing elections, as they did for Obama in […] Read more »
Trump Sees an Economy in Tatters, But Many Republicans Are Feeling Fine
The 2016 campaign may be centered on the question of whether America is struggling or thriving economically, but data from Gallup indicate a majority of Americans think their economic lives are improving. The numbers challenge a dominant theme of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign – that most Americans are […] Read more »