Those who were skeptical of the dominant media narrative from the start receive fresh confirmation.
Within establishment political and media circles, the mythology surrounding the motives of white working-class voters has been the most popular and enduring explanation for why Donald Trump is in the White House.
It’s a misleading narrative — but it has nevertheless become such an ingrained article of faith that even some progressive leaders have been reluctant to describe as “fake news.”
As the story goes, Trump’s campaign rhetoric primarily appealed to poor, white, and Christian men who saw themselves partially reflected in the image of a politically incorrect straight-talker — a billionaire mogul who’d be a traitor to his class and wage war on elites of all stripes. Happy to look past his personal imperfections, playboy reputation and failed business history, Trump’s white voters clung to the tender hope that he would keep his campaign pledges and improve their economic well-being. Their mantra was the ridiculous “Make America Great Again.”
And it is all wrong and misguided.
So says a new study that contradicts that narrative, instead asserting that Trump voters are much less worried about their financial well-being than they are about losing their dominant status as white people within a demographically diverse and ever-changing nation.
Writing in an academic journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Diana C. Mutz, a University of Pennsylvania political science and communications professor, argues that white, Christian, and male voters — who made up the bulk of Trump’s base — cast their ballot out of deep-seated fear that their social standing in America was slowly eroding and that Trump was the best candidate to arrest this perceived decline.
https://thinkprogress.org/new-study-confirms-support-for-trump-was-driven-by-white-fear-2d2569e49c06/
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