A massive new survey released today reveals two distinct partisan visions about the nature of discrimination in America today. Republicans reject the idea that black people, immigrants, and gay and lesbian Americans face discrimination, while overwhelming majorities of Democrats say they do. White Americans—particularly white Christians—are also generally less likely […] Read more »
Working-Class Republicanism
A new book tells the story of a president who made his name as an entertainer and a Democrat before moving to the Republican Party and then launching a bid for the presidency. This candidate won his party’s presidential nomination despite objections from some party stalwarts that he was unelectable […] Read more »
Differences, in black and white: Rural Americans’ views often set apart by race
… A new nationwide Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted this spring finds that although rural Americans are more likely to see their communities as neighborly, safer and having better public schools than people in large cities, those opinions come with wide racial disparities. Black rural Americans — most of […] Read more »
Rural divide
The political divide between rural and urban America is more cultural than it is economic, rooted in rural residents’ deep misgivings about the nation’s rapidly changing demographics, their sense that Christianity is under siege and their perception that the federal government caters most to the needs of people in big […] Read more »
It’s time to bust the myth: Most Trump voters were not working class.
Media coverage of the 2016 election often emphasized Donald Trump’s appeal to the working class. The Atlantic said that “the billionaire developer is building a blue-collar foundation.” The Associated Press wondered what “Trump’s success in attracting white, working-class voters” would mean for his general election strategy. On Nov. 9, the […] Read more »
A Tale of Two Populisms
… Trump’s populism surely played a role in the surge of white working-class voters to the GOP ticket in 2016. But Trump’s brand of populism—and more importantly, that of working-class whites—differs in important ways from the populism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I don’t mean only that Trump’s populism […] Read more »