So, we always hear how the Republican Party, especially the Trump coalition, is the movement for white men from left-leaning news outlets. Bashing white people is a favorite pastime of the progressive Left. When you look at the numbers, yes—Donald Trump won the white vote. That’s beyond dispute. He also won big league with white working class women and did better with voters who make $50,000 a year or less than Mitt Romney. The rural uprising was the focal point for many post-mortems, notably how if Clinton lost rural voters to Trump by a two-to-one margin instead of three-to-one—the election could have been different. Hence, newsflash for Democrats: white voters still matter. They’re going to make up around 70 percent of the electorate, as they did in 2016, in 2020 and will continue to be the majority of the electorate in future presidential contests. So, a slight shift can tilt an election, whereas Latino voters, who live in states that aren’t competitive in national elections, won’t. Yet, Matt Breunig wrote in Medium that maybe this whole notion about Trump being all about white men is wrong. In fact, when you look at the exit polls again, the majority of Trump voters
The number underneath each race+gender grouping is that group’s share of the electorate. So, for instance, the 34% under “white men” means that 34% of all voters were white men. The 7% under “black women” means that 7% of all voters were black women. And so on.If you multiply each group’s share by their percent support for Trump, you can determine how many of Trump’s points came from that group. So, for white men, you would multiply 34% by 62% to get 21.08 points, meaning that 21.08 points of Trump’s 46.21 points came from white men. The rest, 25.13 points, came from women and people of color (you can check this yourself by doing the exact same math as I detailed for white men on every other group in that graphic and adding the points together).
Put more clearly, according to the Edison exit poll, 45.6% of Trump voters were white men, while 54.4% were women and people of color.
Breunig also noted that white working class voters did go overwhelmingly for Trump, but they’re only 34 percent of the electorate, meaning that the majority of Trump voters are not from the working class. He also noted the liberal bent in the media about the “hillbilly voter” isn’t necessarily wishing ill upon them—though I disagree with that (he argues the authors don’t feel that way, despite their words)—but instead giving the all clear for class-based oppression.
“The only thing they [liberals] feel comfortable doing is wishing (or being indifferent towards) class-based oppression on rednecks.” This feeds into a point that Joan Williams wrote in Harvard Business Review, where liberals write off working class anger, as racism is “dangerous.”
National debates about policing are fueling class tensions today in precisely the same way they did in the 1970s, when college kids derided policemen as “pigs.” This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. Police get solid wages, great benefits, and a respected place in their communities. For elites to write them off as racists is a telling example of how, although race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society, class-based insults still are.
This view surely upends any liberal swipe that aims to discredit Trump and right-leaning politics as a whole.
