General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I just had a thought. Some Trumpers are former Democrats angry at losing good jobs [View all]betsuni
(25,806 posts)conducted from 1992 to 2008. But by 2015, white voters who had a high school degree or less were 24 percentage points more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. ... Meanwhile, whites with a college degree shifted toward the Democratic Party. Thus, the increasing alignment between education and whites' party identification -- also known as the 'diploma divide' -- was largely a phenomenon of the Obama era and preceded the 2016 campaign itself."
Why? Race. "For many years, whites with less formal education had not mapped their views about race onto their political views. Because they tended to follow politics less closely, they had not fully learned or internalized the long-standing divisions between the Democratic and Republican Parties on civil rights and other issues related to race. But once Obama was in office, whites with less formal education became better able to connect racial issues to partisan politics."
Obama easily won in 2008 because of the Republican-caused Great Recession. "Even if voters did blame Obama, one would expect defections from the Democratic Party to reverse themselves as the economic recovery took hold, but instead the defections accelerated over the course of Obama's presidency. This is why racial attitudes appear the most likely culprit. ... The economy had improved since the Great Recession and voters realized it, but their assessment of Obama and the country were less favorable than the economy alone might have predicted. At the same time, however, there was little evidence of any increase in 'voter anger' leading into the election year -- and no clear signs of a 'change election' predicated on growing anger." Trump voters changed their opinion of the economy pretty much overnight from when 2016 to 2017.
In the VOTER Survey, no relationship between views of trade and voting. "Republicans became more opposed to free trade agreements during the campaign, suggesting that they changed their views of trade to match Trump's rather than drawing on their views of trade to choose a presidential candidate."
From Sides, Tesler, Vavreck, "Identity Crises, The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America"