Between Richard Nixon’s election by the silent majority in 1968 and Donald Trump’s stunning victory in 2016, there have been six conservative waves that swept Republicans into office. Disaffected white voters without college degrees have been the driving force in all of them. … Despite their declining share of the […] Read more »
Why identity politics couldn’t clinch a Clinton win
Many Democrats have believed that a coalition of minorities, millennials and single women would help create a new Democratic majority for years to come. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was counting on it. But the “rising American electorate,” as it’s called, failed to carry Clinton across the finish line. It didn’t […] 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 »
Yes, working class whites really did make Trump win. No, it wasn’t simply economic anxiety.
We knew all along that Donald Trump drew his strength from the white working class. We knew this from the patterns in the primaries. We knew this from the nonstop polling conducted over the past 18 months. We knew this from all of the campaign-trail dispatches showing his anti-trade, anti-elite […] Read more »
The Left After Trump
… Trump won because he managed to peel away enough working class white voters while retaining the middle-class and rural Republican base. A classic pattern of support for right-wing populism follows the shape of a V-curve with most support coming from either end of the political spectrum: the relatively deprived […] Read more »
The Clintons were undone by the middle-American voters they once knew so well
Few Americans knew the voters who rejected Hillary Clinton better than her husband. He lived among them growing up, and then studied them with a fanatical intensity during his political rise. But now, with any notion of a dynasty dead and gone, one explanation for the stunning political demise of […] Read more »