From the lawcha.org article -
“Only 48% of Trump voters were working-class whites, while 38% were middle-class whites (by education), and 13% were nonwhite.” - That’s a bit like saying “Only the majority were working class whites but we can make them the minority with some very flaky math” which requires you to sum up all of the other groups/minorities. That’s called lying with statistics.
From the washingtonpost.com article -
“Trump supporters had household incomes at or below the national median of about $50,000. Another third made $50,000 to $100,000, and another third made $100,000 or more and that was true even when we limited the analysis to only non-Hispanic whites.”
Wait, Hispanics are white now? We’re conflating races to make bullshit points fit the article narrative? Even then if you look at the caucasian whites it’s split 50/50, that’s still not an overwhelming majority by any stretch.
TIME meanwhile is apparently on about redefining the working class. As far as I’m aware there’s agreed statistics for working out what line that falls upon and TIME aren’t the people in charge of that.
The one article that has high quality data is the fivethirtyeight.com one, because that actually gives something chewy (raw income data weighted by exit poll) so let’s take a peek at that -
“I estimate that 27 percent of American households had incomes under $30,000 last year. By comparison, 20 percent of Clinton voters did, as did 18 percent of Sanders supporters. (Those figures imply Clinton might have a bigger edge on Sanders if more poor people voted, although it would depend on whether they were black, white or Hispanic.) Both Democratic candidates do better than the Republicans in this category, however. Only 12 percent of Trump voters have incomes below $30,000; when you also consider that Clinton has more votes than Trump overall, that means about twice as many low-income voters have cast a ballot for Clinton than for Trump so far this year.”
This bit is key. This comes back to what I said about mobilising Democrat vote, the biggest lead the Democrats have is among the people on the poverty line, the suggestion is among these numbers Clinton might have edged Sanders (presuming they even voted at all) however it also suggests that Clinton failed to mobilise this vote sufficiently to get over the line.
This does somewhat limit the notion that the “working class vote” was all Trump but as evidenced - he had control of the white, non-college degree vote, that was his majority share of the vote, and most of those still came in with a family income of anywhere between 50-100k (50 thousand dollars here converts to about £37,500 - as a family income? That’s not going to get you that far in the UK, dunno about the US).
It may contradict that his base was predominantly white “working class”, but it most definitely doesn’t shoot holes in the notion that it was white, non-college grads who (and I’m going to refer to Moore because he made the most succinct argument on the matter) felt that Politics had left them behind and they felt the overriding need to deliver a “fuck you” to Washington.
They’re looking for a Father figure and a strong man, much like how Russia has wound up cosying up to Putin for the same reasons. It’s not so much the entertainment factor, it’s about someone who, at least in terms of optics, puts America first.
