Why is Trump doing as well in Massachusetts as in Mississippi? High percentage of white racists.
Another important factor is race. So far, there has been a strong relationship between Mr. Trump’s share of the vote by state and measures of racial animosity or bias. While no one suggests that all of Mr. Trump’s supporters are racist, surveys show that they are particularly likely to express explicit racial prejudice. And the Northeastern states often sit alongside the South at the top of these indicators, despite the Northeast’s reputation as a bastion of liberalism.
There’s a remarkably strong correlation, for example, between Mr. Trump’s support and the number of racist Web searches by state. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight said that the measure was the single strongest correlation of support for Mr. Trump that he could find.
Survey data point toward the same finding. For instance, support for Mr. Trump was strongly correlated with higher levels of resentment about racial issues — like the belief that black people don’t work hard enough and yet receive special favors — in an analysis of the American National Election 2016 Pilot Study.
Mr. Trump’s strength among voters with higher levels of racial resentment helps explain his strength among the new Republicans, many of whom shifted allegiance during moments when race was particularly salient in politics, the 1960s, the 1980s and even during the Obama era.
Of course, not all of the new Republicans left the Democrats because of racial resentment. The Democrats’ leftward shift on other cultural issues — like abortion and gay marriage — undoubtedly alienated many Catholics and Southern Evangelicals. The rising affluence of these same groups most likely diminished the economic appeal of the Democratic message over the last century as well.
But Nixon’s “Southern strategy” had a Northeastern component, and it drew plenty of old Democrats into the Republican Party. In his influential book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” the Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips noted the declining Democratic strength among Northeastern Catholics in the 1960s, in part because of the view that “Negroes or other minority groups are taking over the Democratic Party.” His prediction that the Republican Party would become more Catholic and populist has been borne out.
The trend continued in the 1980s. The term “Reagan Democrat” was coined by the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg in Macomb County, Mich., where autoworkers saw the Democrats as working for the benefit of minority groups. Mr. Trump won 48 percent of the vote in Macomb County in early March.
A similar pattern resurfaces in 2008, when Hillary Clinton defeated Mr. Obama among white voters across nearly this same area.
The single strongest correlation of support for Mr. Trump is the number of racist web searches by state.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/141780860612
