I think the idea is that you thinking they are stupid is much different from being fired from a job (or removed as a partner, however you would frame this scenario). The changing externalities leads to that gray area.

Political viewpoint should never be in my opinion a contributor towards dismissal. The problem here, is that I can easily see some of the Trump-style racial discomfort that he exploited leading to being fired from a job / removed as a partner, or at the very least hindering advancement, for actual non-political reasons.

In any internationally exposed company, Muslims and Mexicans (and other nationalities / religious groups, but these have been the focal points of the Trump campaign) might be your customers. They might even be some of your employees. Now, say you are one of those with said Trump-exploited racial discomfort and you quite often babble about how evil the Muslims are or how nasty those Mexican immigrants are etc. One can certainly infer that one does not really want to put this person anywhere near any job where they might be on a team with actual Muslims or Mexicans, let alone exec type of positions where you may be visiting Muslim/Mexican employees or customers directly.

I really don't care for Marco's attempt to strong-arm YCombinator based on a political candidate (not all Trump supporters are supporting him for the racial discomfort type thing anyways). But I do sometimes wonder whether those holding racial discomfort viewpoints do in fact have a potential barrier to life progress and even whether this sort of thing is a potential contributor to the inequality gap. The challenge to me is how to reduce this without resorting to the often condescending / insulting / I'm-holier-than-thou type responses you frequently see in discussions about this topic.

I think you are mistaken there: single-issue tax and supreme court voters are not a very big part of Trump's support base.

This piece in Cracked managed to explain a lot of the red state support with genuine understanding. The bottom line is, people lash out when they don't have a voice.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...

(I'm sorry the headline is just as stupid as all Cracked headlines are. The article is not.)

Yeah, I read some of that the other day. I continue to think that my single issue voters together are a larger block than the people in that article. The article doesn't have any more statistics than I do.