Between Barack Obama’s 2008 election and 2016, America has transformed from being a majority white Christian nation (54 percent) to a minority white Christian nation (43 percent). But on Election Day, paradoxically, this anxious minority swarmed to the polls to elect as president the candidate who promised to “make America […] 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 »
Donald Trump’s Victory Was Built on Unique Coalition of White Voters
… One of the biggest upsets in American political history was built on a coalition of white voters unlike that of any other previous Republican candidate, according to election results and interviews with voters and demographic experts. Mr. Trump’s coalition comprised not just staunchly conservative Republicans in the South and […] Read more »
Trump’s Victory and the Rise of White Populism
It will take weeks or months to fully parse Donald J. Trump’s upset presidential victory, but his campaign was driven, at least in part, by the dramatic rise of a new kind of white populism. … I have spent the past year investigating the rise of that new kind of […] Read more »
Why Trump Won: Working-Class Whites
Donald J. Trump won the presidency by riding an enormous wave of support among white working-class voters. It was always a possibility, but it had looked highly unlikely. Hillary Clinton led in nearly every national poll — and in other surveys in the states worth the requisite 270 electoral votes. […] Read more »
The GOP’s class warfare mistake
The political landscape was ripe this year for a credible Republican alternative to Democrat Hillary Clinton. But that never meant that merely any alternative would do. Donald Trump failed to pass the smell test among general-election voters. Even if they had doubts about Clinton, they often had even greater doubts […] Read more »