The Guardian: Party and protest: the radical history of gay liberation, Stonewall and Pride

The Stonewall riots were not the birth of the gay rights movement. They weren’t even the first time LGBTQ+ people had fought back against police harassment. In 1966, in the Tenderloin neighbourhood of San Francisco, transgender customers of Compton’s Cafeteria had attacked police, following years of harassment and discrimination by both cops and management. Seven years before that, when police had raided Coopers, a donut shop in the city nestled between two gay bars, LGBTQ+ patrons had attacked officers after the arrest of a number of drag queens, sex workers and gay men. [...]

Those two decades, however, would be among the hardest for LGBTQ+ people in US history, as the greater visibility of the homosexual identity led to a conservative backlash, and a moral panic in the media that was capitalised upon by politicians. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association included homosexuality in its new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, classifying it as a “sociopathic personality disturbance”. Meanwhile, Senator Joe McCarthy was using public revulsion towards homosexuals in his campaign against leftists. Communists and homosexuals were inextricably linked as anti-American subversives, he argued. Talking to reporters, McCarthy stated: “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker.” [...]

As Pride parades have been organised around the world, LGBTQ+ people have often found themselves as proxies in wider political battles. In recent years accusations have been made that Pride has become part of a “homonationalist” project, where the victories won by LGBTQ+ activists since the 50s, in the face of widespread opposition and hostility, are now portrayed as inevitable products of a national culture. Such a process is used to portray other countries as “less civilised”, despite the role that European empires had in imposing anti-sodomy laws in their colonies and suppressing other cultural approaches to gender. This is doubly ironic, considering the role that US evangelical movements still have in funding political campaigns in many parts of Africa for the continuation or even strengthening of colonial-era anti-sodomy laws. Last year, Richard Grenell, Donald Trump’s ambassador to Germany, attacked Iran, saying that “barbaric public executions are all too common in a country where consensual homosexual relationships are criminalised and punishable by flogging and death”. This is true, of course – but then the same could be said for the US’s close regional ally, Saudi Arabia.

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Salon: Female voters are fleeing Trump, hurting his re-election odds: polling analyst

After reviewing polling over the last 70 years, the pollster wrote, "[Joe] Biden is leading among female registered voters by 59% to 35%, a 25-point margin when the numbers aren't rounded. That's a significant increase from his 19-point advantage earlier this year and the 14-point lead Hillary Clinton had in the final 2016 preelection polls of registered voters. Clinton had a 13-point edge with likely female voters." [...]

What keeps Biden's numbers against Trump from being overwhelming is the fact that president still does better with men, with the pollster writing, "Perhaps what makes Biden more impressive with women is how weak he is with men. He's seen only a 2-point climb with them from earlier this year and is still losing them to Trump by 6 points. That's about how Clinton did with them in the final 2016 preelection polling. Clinton trailed by 5 and 7 points among registered voters and likely male voters, respectively." [...]

"Still, you'd rather have women on your side than men for the simple reason that they make up a slightly larger share of voters. Biden's overall advantage would be about a point less if women and men made up an equal share of the electorate. That doesn't matter at this moment, but it could if the polls tighten up," he wrote before concluding, "For now, all we can say is if this election were just left up to men, we'd be talking about a clear Trump lead instead of what it is in reality: a big Biden advantage."

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The Intercept: The Bernie Blackout

Bernie Sanders faced a media blackout that helped sink his 2016 run for president. Today, the trend continues: Sanders gets less media coverage and a higher rate of negative coverage than his top rivals for the Democratic nomination in 2020.

UnHerd: Trump’s white identity politics

Academic research has shown that whites’ political opinions are frequently linked to their views of minorities. For example, whites’ opinions about a range of issues such as civil rights, crime, and social welfare programs are linked to how they view African Americans, and their opinions about anti-terrorism policies are linked to how they view Muslims.

But white group identity has typically been less prevalent and less potent when compared to minority group’s sense of identity with other minority group members. This is because group identity typically thrives under conditions of separation, marginalisation, and discrimination – conditions that are more commonly experienced by minorities. Thus, whites have not necessarily felt a strong connection to other whites or made political choices with their identity as whites at the forefront of their minds. By contrast, minority group members’ sense of connection to their own group routinely affects their political choices. [...]

In ‘activating’ white group consciousness, Trump made it a stronger predictor of how people voted. The salience of white identity was not evident in recent presidential elections precisely because it was linked to Trump himself. Just as Domenech feared, Trump made white identity politics a modern reality. [...]

One other finding also suggests that Trump himself was the key factor. In the spring of 2016, a separate ANES survey asked people how they would vote if the general election matched up Trump and Clinton, Cruz and Clinton, and Rubio and Clinton. The results are telling: perceptions of discrimination against whites were significantly associated with support for Trump over Clinton, but not with support for Rubio or Cruz over Clinton.

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Crooked Media Wilderness: The Filter

How can Democrats break through in today’s media environment? A strategy for rethinking the way we communicate with the public.

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The Atlantic: Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt

The answer may lie in how Trump and his supporters define corruption. In a forthcoming book entitled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”

Fox’s decision to focus on the Iowa murder rather than Cohen’s guilty plea illustrates Stanley’s point. For many Fox viewers, I suspect, the network isn’t ignoring corruption so much as highlighting the kind that really matters. When Trump instructed Cohen to pay off women with whom he had affairs, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional gender and class hierarchies. Since time immemorial, powerful men have been cheating on their wives and using their power to evade the consequences. [...]

Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about Clinton’s? Likely because Hillary’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption. “When female politicians were described as power-seeking,” noted the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto in a 2010 study, “participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust).”

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Vox: Elizabeth Warren has a plan to save capitalism

Warren wants to eliminate the huge financial incentives that entice CEOs to flush cash out to shareholders rather than reinvest in businesses. She wants to curb corporations’ political activities. And for the biggest corporations, she’s proposing a dramatic step that would ensure workers and not just shareholders get a voice on big strategic decisions. [...]

The conceit tying together Warren’s ideas is that if corporations are going to have the legal rights of persons, they should be expected to act like decent citizens who uphold their fair share of the social contract and not act like sociopaths whose sole obligation is profitability — as is currently conventional in American business thinking. [...]

The charter tells company directors to consider the interests of all relevant stakeholders — shareholders, but also customers, employees, and the communities in which the company operates — when making decisions. That could concretely shift the outcome of some shareholder lawsuits but is aimed more broadly at shifting American business culture out of its current shareholders-first framework and back toward something more like the broad ethic of social responsibility that took hold during WWII and continued for several decades. [...]

One important real-world complication that Friedman’s article largely neglects is that business lobbying does a great deal to determine what the laws are. It’s all well and good, in other words, to say that businesses should follow the rules and leave worrying about environmental externalities up to the regulators. But in reality, polluting companies invest heavily in making sure that regulators underregulate — and it seems to follow from the doctrine of shareholder supremacy that if lobbying to create bad laws is profitable for shareholders, corporate executives are required to do it.

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Crooked Media: Wilderness The Nightmare

Why did Democrats lose the 2016 election? The candidates, campaigns, and conditions that led to America’s worst person becoming president.

The Wilderness is a documentary from Crooked Media and Two-Up about the history and future of the Democratic Party. Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau tells the story of a party finding its way out of the political wilderness through conversations with strategists, historians, policy experts, organizers, and voters. In fifteen chapters, the series explores issues like inequality, race, immigration, sexism, foreign policy, media strategy, and how Democrats can build a winning majority that lasts.

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Vox: A Russian newspaper editor explains how Putin made Trump his puppet

Mikhail Fishman It is strange. It looks a bit irrational on Trump's part to be sure. Why does he have this strange passion for Putin and Russia? I have to say, I don't believe in the conspiracy theories about "golden showers" and blackmailing. I don't believe it exists and I don't believe it's a factor. But this, admittedly, makes the whole thing that much stranger. [...]

In their habits, they're radically different. Trump is a posturing performer, full of idiotic narcissism. He appears to be a disorganized fool, to be honest. Putin, on the other hand, is calculating, organized, and he plans everything. He also hides much of his personal life in a way that Trump does not.

Then there's also the fact that Putin is so much more experienced than Trump. He has more than 15 years of global political experience. He knows how to do things, how to work the system. He makes plenty of mistakes, but he knows how to think and act. Trump is a total neophyte. He has no experience and doesn't understand how global politics operates. He displays his ignorance every single day. [...]

Mikhail Fishman Because he knew that would mean an extension of Obama's harsh orientation to Russia, perhaps even more aggressive than Obama. Putin has experienced some difficult years since his 2014 invasion of Crimea, but he didn't expect this level of isolation. He saw — and sees — Trump as an opportunity to change the dynamic.Mikhail Fishman Because he knew that would mean an extension of Obama's harsh orientation to Russia, perhaps even more aggressive than Obama. Putin has experienced some difficult years since his 2014 invasion of Crimea, but he didn't expect this level of isolation. He saw — and sees — Trump as an opportunity to change the dynamic. [...]

Mikhail Fishman He didn't believe Trump would win, so he was preparing to sell Clinton's victory as a fraud. And this is part of his broader message across the board, which is that democracy itself is flawed, broken, unjust. Putin actually believes this. He doesn't believe in democracy, and this is the worldview that he basically shares with Trump: that the establishment is corrupt and that the liberal world order is unjust.

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The New York Times: What if Trump’s Nativism Actually Hurts Him Politically?

Contrary to received wisdom, however, the immigration issue did not play to Mr. Trump’s advantage nearly as much as commonly believed. According to our analysis of national survey data from the American National Election Studies (a large, representative sample of the population of the United States), Hillary Clinton did better in the election than she would have if immigration had not been so prominent an issue. In fact, a liberal backlash seems to have contributed to Mrs. Clinton’s victory in the popular vote count. [...]

We found that Mr. Trump did only slightly better than his Republican predecessors among anti-immigrant whites. Among pro-immigration whites, however, Mrs. Clinton far outpaced John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. For example, Mr. Obama received the votes of 50 percent of pro-immigration whites in 2012, whereas Mrs. Clinton won the votes of 72 percent of that group in 2016 — a 22-point difference. [...]

We can’t know whether this asymmetry across elections is a function of Mr. Trump’s nativism, Mrs. Clinton’s inclusive pronouncements about immigration, or both. What we can say is that after Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton repeatedly clashed over the issue during the course of the campaign, Mr. Trump’s electoral gain — relative to the percentages Mr. Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush received on the issue — paled against Mrs. Clinton’s gains over Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama. [...]

What does our analysis say more generally about the efficacy of politicizing xenophobia and racism in American elections? First, by instigating a liberal counterreaction, it seems possible that highlighting immigration may no longer be an effective political strategy for the Republican Party. This may be the case for two related reasons.  

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Coffee Break: The Art of the Non-Apology

The Atlantic: There Is No Immigration Crisis

I think this argument is wrong. It’s wrong because it conflates good politics with good policy. It may be true that Democrats would benefit politically by taking a harder line on illegal immigration, as Bill Clinton benefitted in the 1990s by taking a harder line on welfare and crime. I’m not sure. The contention is plausible but difficult to prove. Regardless, family detention is a terrible response to a largely fictitious crisis. It would be lovely if shrewd politics and sound policy always went hand in hand. But it’s important for commentators to acknowledge that, often, they don’t. [...]

There’s some truth to this. As the Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner has shown, using data from the American National Election Study, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney among voters with negative views of undocumented immigrants. And, crucially, he did no worse among voters with positive views. In Klinkner’s words, “Trump won in 2016 by mobilizing the minority of Americans with anti-immigration views—but only because he avoided an offsetting counter-mobilization by the majority of Americans with pro-immigration views.” [...]

Frum, Sullivan, and Zakaria think Democrats need a middle path. They should oppose Trump’s most brutal policies while more clearly acknowledging public anxiety about illegal immigration and endorsing measures to stop it. The theory, presumably, is that such a strategy could lure back some white voters who flipped from Obama to Trump over immigration without depressing turnout among the Democrats’ pro-immigrant, young, progressive, and minority base. In the hands of a gifted candidate, this might work. Bill Clinton appeased white voters in 1992 and 1996 with his punitive stances on welfare and crime while still galvanizing a large liberal and African American turnout. Barack Obama took a harder rhetorical line against illegal immigration in 2012 than Hillary Clinton took in 2016 yet won a larger share of the Latino vote. As I’ve noted previously, Democrats might benefit from emphasizing the virtues of assimilation, and focusing on helping immigrants learning English, thus counteracting Trump’s claim that immigration undermines national unity. [...]

This is misleading. Over the last decade, illegal immigration has been going down. Between 1983 and 2006, according to the Border Patrol, the United States apprehended roughly one million—and sometimes as many as 1.5 million—undocumented immigrants per year along America’s southwest border (where the vast majority of undocumented migrants cross). That number steadily dwindled during Obama’s presidency. In fiscal year 2016 (which began in October 2015 and ended in September 2016), it was 408,000—less than half the number in 2009.  [...]

But the evidence for this argument is weak. In a 2007 study of undocumented Mexican migrants, Wayne A. Cornelius of the University of California at San Diego and Idean Salehyan of the University of North Texas found that “tougher border controls have had remarkably little influence on the propensity to migrate illegally to the USA.” Surveying the academic literature for The Washington Post this March, Anna Oltman of the University of Wisconsin at Madison noted that, “researchers increasingly find that deterrence has only a weak effect on reducing unauthorized immigration.” A weak effect isn’t no effect. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies probably contributed to the drop in border crossings last year. Yet those numbers are now returning to their pre-Trump levels. In early April, in an effort to push them back down, the Trump administration announced that it would separate parents and children. Yet the number of apprehensions in both April and May was almost identical to the number in March.

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The Atlantic: Evangelical Fear Elected Trump

Despite all these scriptural passages, it is still possible to write an entire history of American evangelicalism as the story of a people failing miserably at overcoming fear with hope, trust, and faith in their God. But it is also possible to find evangelicals, drawing deeply from Christian theological resources, who sought to forge an alternative history. [...]

Our history of evangelical fear might also include a chapter on the early 19th-century Protestants who feared the arrival of massive numbers of Catholic immigrants to American shores. They translated their panic into political organizations such as the nativist Know-Nothing Party and religious tracts cautioning fellow believers of the threat that such “popery” posed to their Christian nation.  [...]

Jedidiah Morse, a Massachusetts minister and the author of geography textbooks, worried that the Bavarian Illuminati, a German anti-Christian secret society, had infiltrated America to “abjure Christianity, justify suicide, advocate sensual pleasures agreeable to Epicurean philosophy, decry marriage, and advocate a promiscuous intercourse among the sexes.” [...]

Evangelicals are not supposed to hate. But many hate Hillary Clinton. The history of that antipathy is long, reaching back at least to Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992. But it was solidified among white evangelical baby boomers when revelations of her husband’s marital infidelities surfaced in 1998. Conservatives who challenged Bill Clinton’s character were outraged when Hillary attacked her husband’s accusers and went on The Today Show and claimed that the impeachment charges against her husband were part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

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Political Critique: Why the right wing fight against cultural nihilism is meaningless: post-modern conservatism as a capitalist product

I believe these conservative critics are deeply misguided in their diagnosis of the situation. While cultural nihilism may be on the rise, the accounts of these critics are strangely idealized. For the conservative critic, cultural nihilism has its roots in the sophistical cafes and salons of Enlightenment Paris and is now propagated by insidious liberal elites who wish to destabilize Western civilization.  These accounts never acknowledge the transformative impact of far more powerful social forces: most notably the emergence of capitalism and its tendency towards the creative-destruction of traditional values. This was noted by Marx more than a century and a half ago:  [...]

Post-modern conservativism is the product of cultural nihilism masquerading as a solution. Post-modern conservatives claim that the locus of truth and morality are homeland identities which have been marginalized by social fragmentation and the demand for more tolerance of difference.  They demand that the traditional morals treasured by homeland identities be restored, and a culture of tolerance replaced by one of “responsibility” for toeing the traditional line.  Oftentimes these post-modern conservatives also claim to be fighting against the nihilism of trends such as cultural relativism and social fragmentation, as with President Trump’s Warsaw speech calling for a defense of “Western Civilization.” But this is to be accomplished by deconstructing the ideals of truth, democracy, and respect for difference that constitute the best features of that civilization.  This has resulted in the erosion of institutions and norms designed to protect the most vulnerable in society.

It is possible that the ascendency of post-modern conservatism will swallow the still too globalized and outdated neo-liberals who increasingly cling to power.  Neo-liberal icons such as David Cameron and Hilary Clinton have seen their authority melt into the air under pressure by post-modern conservatives who denigrate them as progressive liberal elites of another stripe, eager to integrate more tightly into the global economy with its rootless cosmopolitans and relativistic multiculturalists. In their place post-modern conservatives have elected illiberal strongmen who disdain the very idea of truth and wish to establish a more homogenous nation-state that will remain oriented by internal capitalist dynamics. This is an extremely worrying development that should be of concern to all.

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CityLab: How Unhappiness Helped Elect Trump

It is widely believed that Trump tapped into increased feelings of anger and anxiety, particularly among white working-class voters outside of large urban areas. But like the presumption that the results of the 2016 election were about economic hardship, this seems to be myth more than reality.

Counties that experienced the biggest surge in Trump voters were not appreciably more likely to have residents who reported higher levels of anger and worry. In fact, counties that went more for Clinton actually had slightly larger shares of residents who said they experienced high degrees of anger and worry than those that swung the most toward Trump, as the table below shows. That said, the counties that swung the most toward Clinton also had slightly higher levels of happiness and enjoyment than those that swung the most for Trump.  [...]

What the research shows instead is that it’s how people think about the bigger picture of their lives, and not just their daily experiences, that drove the big vote swings of 2016. Indeed, the counties that saw the largest jump in votes for the Republican presidential candidate between 2012 and 2016 were made up of residents who also reported the lowest levels of both satisfaction with their current lives and optimism about the future. [...]

In counties where Trump increased the Republican share of votes by more than 10 percent, current life satisfaction improved by just 1.7 percent, and optimism for the future improved by just 1.6 percent. But in counties where Clinton gained more than 10 percent over Obama, current life satisfaction had improved by 2.7 percent and optimism for the future by 3 percent.

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The Atlantic: A Bright Red Flag for Democracy

Another group is speaking out, too: people who believe the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas was staged, and that students like Gonzalez are actors, not victims. Far-right provocateurs have focused on David Hogg, a 17-year-old student who had the self-possession to interview his classmates while the shootings were taking place. Hogg’s composure in interviews, his criticism of President Donald Trump, and the fact that his father is a retired FBI agent have fueled a conspiracy theory that claims Hogg has been paid—by Hillary Clinton, George Soros, or favorite figures among conspiracy theorists—to promote an anti-gun agenda. Supported by media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, the conspiracy theories have received a big boost from YouTube, with its algorithms that push videos targeting Hogg to the top of trending video lists.  [...]

In the mid-1960s, 77 percent of Americans reported trust in the U.S. government to do the right thing all or most of the time, according to surveys from Gallup and the National Elections Survey. Asked the same question in a Gallup poll late last year, only 18 percent reported trusting the government. This isn’t a Trump-specific phenomenon. Trust has been falling in the United States for decades, and it hit comparably low points during the Clinton and Obama presidencies. [...]

Despite having good reason not to trust the political process, the students are doing what we’ve been taught to do as citizens: tell our legislators what we think, and if they don’t listen, demand to be heard. So far, that’s not gone especially well. One group of students traveled to Tallahassee to meet with legislators and instead watched 71 Republican legislators block debate on bills to limit high-capacity magazines. A town meeting with legislators, televised by CNN, went little better, as politicians squirmed uncomfortably and failed to answer the blunt questions put forward by students. [...]

Mistrust is expensive. When people worry that the media is being manipulated, it takes work to get to a set of facts we trust, and more work to get to a common set of facts we can discuss or debate. When people worry legislators aren’t listening to citizens, but to corporations and lobby groups, they move beyond letters and phone calls to protests and rallies. Two decades ago, the author Frank Fukayama posited that high-trust societies were wealthier than low-trust ones because fiscal transaction costs were lower. As Americans experience an increasingly paralyzed and dysfunctional federal government, it’s clear that mistrust is raising the costs of representative democracy.

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Vox: How gun ownership became a powerful political identity

If only gun owners had voted in the 2016 election, then Donald Trump would have won every single state save Vermont. If only people who don’t own guns had voted, then Hillary Clinton would have won every state, save West Virginia and maybe Wyoming.

SurveyMonkey, which conducted the poll reaching these conclusions, found that the voting divide between gun owners and non-owners was starker than divides between white and nonwhite Americans, between working-class whites and the rest of the nation, and between rural and urban voters. “No other demographic characteristic created such a consistent geographic split,” the New York Times’s Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy write.

That doesn’t mean that gun ownership is more important in explaining American political behavior than race or class or gender. But it does mean that gun ownership has an extremely strong correlation with conservative, pro-Republican voting. [...]

“Few people realize it, but the Ku Klux Klan began as a gun control organization,” UCLA law professor Adam Winkler writes in Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “After the Civil War, the Klan and other violent racist groups sought to reaffirm white supremacy, which required confiscating the guns blacks had obtained for the first time during the conflict.” He notes that a century later, in the 1960s, politicians turned to gun control measures to “disarm politically radical urban blacks, like the Black Panthers.” [...]

The gun gap could just be an artifact of other demographics. For instance, we know that for a whole host of historical reasons, black Americans overwhelmingly vote for Democrats and whites mostly vote for Republicans; whites are also likelier to own guns, so the gap might reflect racial differences. Same goes for partisan gender gaps (women are more likely to be Democrats and less likely to own guns), rural/urban gaps, and so forth.

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Vox: Why Christian conservatives supported Trump — and why they might regret it

He argues that religious conservatives knew Trump was flawed but took a chance on him anyway. Tired of establishment Republicans and weary of the Obama years, they were willing to roll the dice on a guy they thought could deliver on a few crucial issues, namely handing over the Supreme Court to pro-life justices. [...]

That’s a great question. I think you have to understand how many religious conservatives perceived Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They felt like they had been traumatized by Barack Obama and his administration. He was stridently pro-abortion; most religious conservatives aren't. His wife and he were strident advocates for the pro-LGBT agenda; most religious conservatives aren’t.  [...]

That then won over prominent clergymen like Franklin Graham and James Dobson. They became apologists for him and used language like, "Well, he's like Churchill. Maybe profane but still ordained.” One of the big positions was that he's Cyrus the Great from the Old Testament, where Cyrus was a vile pagan but still used by God for his purposes. All of this was bandied about. All of this was spoken from pulpits. All of this was said on religious media and secular media like Fox News, etc.  [...]

I think we're going to have a wave of independents. I know many like that. I think many of them are tired of the conservative church being the Republican Party at prayer. They see merits on the other side. Again, they're not gonna go full-on Democrat, because some of these central moral issues like abortion and LGBT and what have you are just not going to let them become Democrats.

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The Intercept: Hard Times in Trump Country

Stewart voted for Obama in 2008 and thinks he “wasn’t a horrible president.” She didn’t like Obamacare, but she loved Obama’s relationship with first lady Michelle. “They love each other and you don’t see that much.” She doesn’t remember whether she voted in 2012. [...]

Today, she doesn’t regret her decision, nor does she try to justify it or apologize for it. “It just seemed like the best choice,” she says. “Better than Hillary, that’s what everybody was saying, so that’s what we went with. A lot of my family was just like, put anybody in that office other than that bitch.” [...]

Stewart feels much more strongly about the media than she does about the president. “Every little decision, every little thing that’s done in politics that’s released to the public — it’s made a big deal of,” she says. “Even if he does something good, they portray it in a way to make it seem negative against him. Everybody’s against Trump, it seems like.” [...]

There are few immigrants in Mason County, which is 97 percent white, and Stewart doesn’t know any. She doesn’t care much for Trump’s immigration crackdown. The wall, she says, “reminds me of something I’d do in kindergarten with my blocks. … I’ll just build a wall and you can’t come over here.” [...]

Trump is “not racist,” Stewart says — just a typical “dirtbag dude.” There are few racists in Stewart’s world, but plenty of assholes — and definitely too many “butthurt” politically correct people who whine too much. She wishes the media would stop making everything about race. “They’re what’s dividing people.”  [...]

Stewart mostly blames the poverty rampant around her on people’s “laziness,” even as she’s keenly aware that the odds are stacked against her neighbors. “I think there’s just a lot of lazy ass kids in this generation that they don’t want to work,” she said. “I think they should be made to get a job. If you don’t get a job, you’ll be fined. If there is nothing wrong with you physically from getting a job, I think that there should be some kind of consequences to it.” She seems more willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt.

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Vox: The past year of research has made it very clear: Trump won because of racial resentment

Contrary to what some have suggested, white millennial Trump voters were not in more economically precarious situations than non-Trump voters. Fully 86 percent of them reported being employed, a rate similar to non-Trump voters; and they were 14 percent less likely to be low income than white voters who did not support Trump. Employment and income were not significantly related to that sense of white vulnerability.  

So what was? Racial resentment.

Even when controlling for partisanship, ideology, region and a host of other factors, white millennials fit Michael Tesler’s analysis, explored here. As he put it, economic anxiety isn’t driving racial resentment; rather, racial resentment is driving economic anxiety. We found, as he has in a larger population, that racial resentment is the biggest predictor of white vulnerability among white millennials. Economic variables like education, income and employment made a negligible difference. [...]

As Schaffner, MacWilliams, and Nteta wrote in their paper, there’s growing evidence that 2016 was unique — in that racism and sexism played a more powerful role than in recent presidential elections. “Specifically, we find no statistically significant relationship between either the racism or sexism scales and favorability ratings of either [previous Republican candidates] John McCain or Mitt Romney,” they wrote. “However, the pattern is quite strong for favorability ratings of Donald Trump.”

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