EDIT: I don't want to bury the (old) lede.
"Education, not income, predicted who would vote for Trump".
In a regression analysis at the county level, for instance, lower-income counties were no more likely to shift to Trump once you control for education levels.x
In fact, in some regression specifications — such as if you weight by a county's population — lower incomes were actually associated with a slight shift toward Clinton, when education levels were held constant.
Okay original post continues...
Here's what you're saying.
1) There is a bloc of voters who have been, are, and always will be persuaded by racist arguments.
2) Someone persuaded by racist arguments will always vote for the racist candidate.
3) This bloc of voters is enough to win elections.
If this was true... why didn't a racist candidate win in 2012? Or in 2008?
Plenty of racist/dog-whistling congressional candidates did win in 2008/2010/2012/2014/2016; Nixon's southern strategy hasn't gone anywhere, or do you think Republican's disproportional domination of the south is just coincidental? I'm going to assume what you meant to say was "why didn't a racist
presidential candidate win in 2008/2010"?
However what you wrote is not even a counter-example to your own summation of the argument. It completely assumes that a racist presidential candidate will always run and that racism is a binary 'yes or no' question with no levels of gradation.
In truth, 1/2/3 and your counterexample (a racist presidential candidate didn't win the election) can all be true if, for example, a racist presidential candidate didn't run in the first place. Or if you add in additional premises that different tiers of racism have differing levels of impact or something like that.
Your point is merely a question, not a rebuttal. "Why didn't a (more) racist presidential candidate run in 2008/2012"? But that question could be answered without reference to 1/2/3 because actors can be non-rational and have imperfect information.
Your argument cannot explain this. Therefore, it is wrong. Just straight, point blank, wrong. Can't get around that.
The fact that a racist candidate didn't win in 2008 and 2012 means that instead of your 1), which is woefully reductive, we have this:
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Even if what you had a written was a logical counterexample it would not prove your argument; that's denying the antecedent.
If P, then Q.
P is an illogical argument, therefore Q is untrue.
If P, then Q.
Not P, therefore not Q.
Both those examples are invalid forms of arguments.
1a) There is a bloc of voters who are sometimes persuaded by racist arguments and sometimes not.
Now, we can explain why a racist candidate didn't win in 2008 and 2012, but did in 2016. 2008 and 2012 were the 'sometimes nots', 2016 was the 'sometimes'.
I'm not trying to argue that 1/2/3 is true; life is never as simple as a formal logical argument, I think we all agree on that. But it is beyond vapid to say in a formal logic context that sometimes a thing happens and sometimes it doesn't. Obviously when people say that something was the main cause they mean it in a more holistic sense as opposed to "whenever P, always Q."
So now we have to figure out what causes an election to be a 'sometimes' and what causes it to be a 'sometimes not'. That is, what makes voters more or less likely to be motivated by racism than the norm.
No disagreements here but this is what people are already doing in the first place. They've merely concluded that this election was due more to racism than other factors. It's perfectly fine to disagree of course, such is the nature of inquiry.
Here's a good one: people who feel like their lives are worse off and their situation is less secure are more easily convinced to lash out at the Other than they are when their lives are improving and their situation is more secure.
Do we have any evidence of this? Why, yes!
The swing voter - the critical voter bloc - that swung the 2016 election was the white working class (earning less than $30,000).
Lot to unpack in so few sentences. Okay, so there's nothing wrong with your initial argument/claim per se but you're papering over a lot of issues by using general language like "secure" and "feel". Those are very subjective factors which you immediately try to correlate with a very objective factor, "white working class voters earning less than $30,000". That's a pretty big jump to say the least.
Now, I don't disagree with the claim that people who make less than $30,000 a year tend to have less secure financial situations than people who make more than $60,000 (that's self-evident), but I do disagree with the idea that a less secure financial situation automatically equates to higher susceptibility to racism, I'm gonna want those receipts. The fact that Trump earned a high share of white working class votes making less than $30,000 a year says nothing about their relative levels of racial thinking/bias compared to other demographic groups, we could (and I would argue we do) have other confounding variables.
Okay, Yes, Trump's average voter was wealthier than Clinton's, but the average voter isn't the important one. Trump's average voter has been Republican for decades, the fact they were Republican again in 2016 doesn't change anything. The marginal voter is what's important, because their decision to switch parties (or not to vote) is what causes elected offices to change hands. And the marginal voter was more susceptible to racist arguments in 2016 than in 2012 or 2008 because their personal lives were and had been stagnant for a very long time.
Okay, I'm just going to ignore the fact that you completely discount that statistic about average wealth of voters (though it seems quite damning in my opinion) and focus on your piece on the marginal voter.
Most glaringly, you don't actually provide any statistics about the marginal/independent voter's income relative to Republican or Democratic voters. That seems very odd, after all, that's the entire thrust of your argument, less money = more response to racism = more votes for trump. So what was the average income of the marginal voter?
I suspect the reason you don't bring it up is because "Education, not income, predicted who would vote for Trump".
In a regression analysis at the county level, for instance, lower-income counties were no more likely to shift to Trump once you control for education levels.x
In fact, in some regression specifications — such as if you weight by a county's population — lower incomes were actually associated with a slight shift toward Clinton, when education levels were held constant.
You finish by stating:
So what's the conclusion? Trump's campaign was racist, but that wasn't the reason he won, in and of itself, because many racist candidates have run before without winning. He won because he persuaded people who were previously not racist (at least, actively so) to become racist, which previous racist candidates had not managed to do. Trump could do so because the underlying conditions were there for it to happen.
I can't even parse the hoops you're jumping through to avoid the conclusion that racism mattered. He didn't win off racism he just won because he convinced more half-racists to vote for him. yeah, huh uh, cool, that sounds like a meaningful distinction.
