"Economic privation does not explain why so many working-class whites chose Mr Trump. The poorest picked Mrs Clinton. Indeed, analysis by the bipartisan Voter Studies Group find no unifying attitude among Trump voters on any economic issue. Much likelier indicators of support for him were cultural and not pretty. They included support for his promised Muslim ban and a belief that white Americans were discriminated against.
As Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist, has written, such biases are fulled by anxiety about socioeconomic status in a changing America. Even as working-class whites find themselves working harder, for less reward, they look around and see women and non-whites on the rise-presumably at their expense, some conclude. This helps explain why there has been a steady flow of working-class whites from the Democrats, the champion of those rising groups, over the past two decades. Mr Trump's success was based on supercharging that pre-existing change, through his attacks on immigrants, Muslims and the trade deals that working-class Americans also decry."
The Economist, November 4, 2017
To me this means that support for Trump among non-college educated whites stems not so much from economic hardship, but from relative economic hardship.
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