Donald Trump’s Identity Politics

The following column by Thomas B. Edsall was posted on the New York Times website August 24, 2017:

Among Republicans who said that their identity as whites was extremely important to them, Trump’s support reached 81 percent, according to survey data. Credit Mark Makela for The New York Times

In the wake of the presidential election, we’ve all been asking simplistic questions about how Donald Trump won. Was it economics? Was it racism? Was it misogyny? Did it come down to identity? We know that it can’t have been just one thing, and that President Trump’s triumph was a concoction of many things. Nonetheless, several factors came together in a peculiar way, with serious electoral consequences. Millions of white voters began to see themselves more openly not as white supremacists but as white identified. Continue reading “Donald Trump’s Identity Politics”