"Elizabeth Warren says Obama doesn't understand 'lived experience of most Americans.'"

[Tom Rinaldo]

105. That can be said of the majority of people who vote Republican in any Presidential election

We know that. It has been a given since at least Nixon's "Southern strategy". The term "Trump voters" means absolutely nothing if you don't factor in that the vast majority of Trump voters would have been Ted Cruz voters or Marco Rubio voters or even Jeb Bush voters if one of those men had won the Republican nomination instead.

The only Trump voters who are particularly worth studying are the ones who voted for Trump but would not have automatically voted for virtually any Republican who got the nomination, and they make up a small minority of Trump's total voters. But as it so happens our Presidential elections are often determined by small percentage shift of voters. That's why talking in sweeping generalities about Trump voters, even when those generalities are true, doesn't yield any valuable insights. Yes, national Democratic politicians always lose virtually all of the hard core racist vote and most of the soft core racist votes.

What matters are new ripples in the overall trends. That's why a big deal was made about so called Reagan Democrats back in the 80's, and why Obama to Trump voters are being studied now. The percentage of Trump's overall votes that came from people who previously voted for Obama is pretty small by all accounts. But they still more then represented Trump's margin of victory in several key states.

I expect that Trump motivated a small percentage of generally apathetic typically non voter hard core racists to go out and vote for him. That may be significant because small numbers can swing elections. But it is meaningless to us as Democrats because there is no way in hell we can or should try to woo those assholes to us. We don't want them, they don't want us. Those weren't the Trump voters who previously voted for Obama however. It is that sub group for whom economics played an important role.