One question in the tumultuous 2016 presidential campaign was whether white evangelicals would “come home” to the GOP and vote for Donald Trump, given his history of divorce, crude language and lack of familiarity with the Bible. We now know from exit polls that they did — in droves. … […] Read more »
Is the Slide Into Tribal Politics Inevitable?
Donald J. Trump’s victory could well push the American party system toward a clash between an overwhelmingly white ethnic party and a cosmopolitan coalition of minority groups and college-educated whites. … Mr. Trump’s campaign may set in motion a process that reorients American politics toward the cosmopolitanism versus nationalism divide […] Read more »
Behind Trump’s win in rural white America: Women joined men in backing him
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 »
The Not-So-Silent White Majority
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 »
The education gap among whites this year wasn’t about education. It was about race.
Election swings are usually pretty uniform. States tend to shift together from one presidential election year to the next. Most demographic groups do as well. But there was one glaring exception this year: College-educated voters became a lot more Democratic and non-college educated voters became a lot more Republican. … […] Read more »
Why We Need Empathy in the Age of Trump
… Emotions are at the bottom of anybody’s political beliefs. Those emotions are evoked by a story that feels true. So a deep story is a story that feels true. You take facts out of a deep story, you take moral judgments out of a story. Their deep story is […] Read more »