Trump lost support slightly among whites relative to Romney. In the northern and midwestern working class areas where Trump made big gains, Obama did well and won many areas that HRC lost. Obama won non college educated whites in Iowa by a substantial margin. Those people didn't vote for Trump this time around because they're now racists.

Does that take into account turnout?

What about the angle that sexism is actually a stronger driver of all this than sexist? It would certainly make the Obama->Trump conversion more explainable.

You are persistently trying to come up with a narrative that tars nearly half the voters in a democratic election as stupid and evil.

If rayiner proves it cannot be racism then possibly it is sexism...

Talk about spreading hate.

I'm no big fan of Trump but I have reason to be thankful for Americans.

And if Americans who live with American politicians year after year decides Trump is their best hope then A) it must be pretty bad IMO B) it is their choice and I respect it.

My claim is that racism and sexism played a very big part in this election. All the news are full of it. All the twitters are full of it. rayiner did not conclusively prove otherwise. Dismissing the issue as 'tarring' half the electorate as racist or sexist is not very useful. It's like saying 'it can't be true that so many people are sexist or racist' when the swing vote between people who always vote republican no matter what and the democrats who stayed at home because they're pissed is actually not that big.

Honestly I find it very strange how strongly people on hacker news are pushing against this idea, how deeply they are insulted by the idea that Trump has brought open sexism into the mainstream.

>Fundamentally this was an election about identity. Nate Cohn said it best in a tweet last night when he pointed out that working class whites (and not their minority compatriots who share the same economic problems)

I'm not sold on that. I think the main difference is that those economic problems have been felt by minorities their entire lives. Not that it's fair, but that's been the reality for them. So it's not any bigger of an issue this election than any other. But the economic pains felt in the white working class haven't been felt since pre-WWII. They were the middle class of this country but now they are feeling the declines. Even if working class whites are now on somewhat equal footing with other minorities, they've been in decline in comparison to what they had. And that definitely leads to "Economic Anxiety".

How did you get from "whites behaving like a minority group" to "racism, social change, fear, and sexism"? Are these whites racist for "behaving like a minority group"? Or are whites "behaving like a minority group" because they're the victims of someone else's racism? Or is the "behaving like a minority group" a red herring, and it's merely racist to vote against the folks who are constantly demonizing people who look like you?

The problem is it's hard to explain the resistance in the United States to safety net programs in the US without bringing that up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

And that's one problem I'm struggling with. Ultimately a lot of the suggestions I see to help the "left behind" in this thread might fail due to this very sort of politics alone. So many of the social help programs in the US have been demonized in the past by focusing on this in coded terms. Think "welfare queens" and the negative reaction to just the "Obamacare" nickname for some of the most direct and obvoius examples.

"Racism, social change, fear, sexism"... that can be overcome. The real problem is how these emotions are used as a political weapon now. No attempted solution will work if an opposition that hates it can transform it into some sort of identity politics battle. Especially now that we've found out that identity politics through a megaphone is actually more effective than "dog whispers".

It is possible for Donald Trump to surprise me, and one way he could surprise me is if he actually is more friendly to a stronger government with the goal of helping these people out. Donald Trump dose not make the laws, however, Congress does. So I expect no change.

As a side note, in a way, it was a shame it wasn't Bernie Sanders vs. Donald Trump for that reason. It would have been fascinating to see if economic policy really could out-trounce the Southern Strategy this time...

The resistance to safety nets is easy to understand: they are not optional (like an insurance, let's say) and usually the same people are paying for the same other people that are receiving. It is not a safety net, it is a transfer of wealth imposed by law.