Trump supporters skew financially comfortable whites whose successful kids left town & other kids are stuck there.https://t.co/OVsHovhJRV
— Al Giordano (@AlGiordano) August 12, 2016
I’m reading Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool — sequel to Nobody’s Fool — and the Trump voters in this Gallup survey are reminding me of Russo characters. (Certainly shifty, worthless developer Carl Roebuck would idolize Donald Trump.) Despite the mealy-mouthed punditry about “economic anxiety,” these Trump supporters would be the first to tell you they’re doing okay, mostly, considering everything. But they’re constantly irritated by a sense that it used to be so much easier for guys like them. Max Ehrenfreund and Jeff Guo, in the Washington Post:
Economic distress and anxiety across working-class white America have become a widely discussed explanation for the success of Donald Trump… Yet a major new analysis from Gallup, based on 87,000 interviews the polling company conducted over the past year, suggests this narrative is not complete. While there does seem to be a relationship between economic anxiety and Trump’s appeal, the straightforward connection that many observers have assumed does not appear in the data.
According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.
Yet while Trump’s supporters might be comparatively well off themselves, they come from places where their neighbors endure other forms of hardship. In their communities, white residents are dying younger, and it is harder for young people who grow up poor to get ahead…