WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY...:

We've been making presentations and talking regularly with reporters and about working-class voters - by which they almost always mean white working-class voters - since 2007. We study class and race in Youngstown, Ohio, a racially-segregated deindustrialized community, so reporters called then to ask whether white industrial workers would vote for an African American or a woman. Now they're asking why white working-class people would be drawn to Trump's anti-immigrant, racist, and sexist bravado.

We could say plenty about the complicated relationship between racism and the working class, but we also know two things. First, although Trump does attract significant support from the working class, but his real base is the middle- and upper-class. Second, while his white working-class fans might respond with open approval to Trump's racist appeals, his more educated, better-off real base embraces it, too.

In reality, the base for Trump, and the core of the Republican Party, is whiter, more rural, older, and more religiously conservative than Democrats. They are also richer. Democrats benefit from what some have called the "diploma divide," winning more votes from people with college degrees, the most commonly-used basis for pollsters to talk about class, but Republicans take the lead - as Trump did in the 2016 vote - among those with incomes of $50K or more. It's simply not true to Trump's appeal comes primarily from economically-insecure voters.

The sad reality is that many voters don't just tolerate the President's nasty remarks because they appreciate his tax cut or his anti-abortion, pro-business Supreme Court nominees. Both racist attitudes and an investment in the racist policies that reinforce inequality in this country also appeal to many voters who, we'd like to think, ought to know better.

In part, Trump's racism appeals because it violates the social rules that many white middle-class people resist. Since at least the 1990s, they've been hearing that they have to be careful what they say about women, people of color, and LGBTQ people, and that rankles. Some genuinely don't get why it's racist to call a black Congressman's district "rat-infested" or to suggest that Representatives of color should go back to the troubled countries they supposedly came from. When critics call these statements racist, many white middle-class people hear a different message: it's never acceptable for white people to criticize people of color. As Kevin M. Kruse suggested in a New York Times op-ed, Trump voices the resentment many white voters - of all classes -- feel about not being able to say what they think. For many, Trump's statements reassure them that they are not racist, they're just not "PC."

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