I am almost tired of saying we tried to tell you, but this new study is literally a point-by-point confirmation of the article I wrote right after the election explaining how racism elected Trump, and how white voters could vote for Obama and still vote on racial anxiety/racism. 
Here is the @voxdotcom article on the study: vox.com/policy-and-pol… Here's the piece I wrote for @NYTmag right after the election: nytimes.com/interactive/20… I was not alone in this coverage. Look @jbouie @jelani9 @fivefifths and so many others.
Repeat after me: Class was largely irrelevant in white voters switch from Obama to Trump. So ths believe that the answer is to simply help working-class white voters see their commonality with working-class voters without addressing their racism is naive and/or willfully ignorant
I mean, these claims about white people voting for Trump based on economic anxiety and not race never stood up to scrutiny because 1) Typical Trump supporter wasnt working-class 2) This logic could never explain why economically anxious folks from other racial groups ALL went HRC
This also disputes the folks who -- inexplicably -- continue to argue white Obama voters switched to Trump because of emails or because HRC was such a bad candidate or, a million other things. This is the 2,543,990 study saying it was race. As some of us said, over & over & over
The question is, will our coverage EVER stop clinging to the narrative of the rightfully angry & left-behind white working-class voter and instead focus on the widespread racism, racial anxiety and fear of demographic change that has always and continues to motivate many w voters
What’s so crazy/appalling, is white voters kept telling us again and again what motivated them. They literally told me, a black reporter, right after the election. Yet, we did not want to believe the narrative. We were invested, as we almost always are, in it *not* being race.
So many white journalists, from the mastheads down, needed/need to believe that only small numbers of white Americans are racist and or racially anxious, and that those who are are of the KKK ilk. That’s just not the reality. It never has been.
And before y’all get all in my mentions about ambivalent voters who stayed home because of HRC, this study is about people who VOTED and white people who switched to Trump or voted for Trump. So, save that for a thread that’s actually relevant.
