Yes, Trump would lose a swath of avowed racists. But if Trump's economic message were giving corporate elites boners, you can be damned sure that they would have helped a huge chunk of the populace come around. "See! and the racist liberals tried to paint Trump and Republicans as racists..." Of course that's not going to happen, because class-warfare prosecuted downward relies too heavily on racism as a dividing mechanism for them to ever let Trump get away with attempting to erode it in a meaningful way, like as it impacts voting rights...but if the media, in all of its forms was so inclined, ...oh it could do a lot towards changing people's minds. People soak that shit up without even knowing they're doing it. It isn't in a vacuum that these people excuse all of those other insults to their intelligence...its because the messaging is working 24/7 to tell them that's not really what it was ever about anyway, "as they well know"...telling them to not worry, they're in good hands.

Again, if you want to tackle voter suppression or poor education, you have to tackle the media, because that is the machinery that has allowed that stuff to happen, either in silence, or with its blessing in the form of outright propaganda.

As I posted in one of the previous links, I do not agree that economic anxiety was disproven as an influencer of our election. As you said, what people believe their reasoning is, is different than their actual reasoning. It is economic anxiety that makes it so effective to make villains out of Mexicans and people on welfare(or read--thanks to the media--black people). Sure, when it comes time to vote, it might be they say it's cuz they don't like Mexicans...but they don't like Mexicans for a very visceral reason. Those Mexicans are actually their enemies...they are doing them harm. You can't separate out the racism from the root of that Racism, and whether that racism comes out of a justification for the scraps of dignity they are clinging to, or comes as a direct consequence of feeling threat and being told who to blame, that is all very much about security, economic and otherwise. It is all very much about being afraid and being handed the culprit for that fear.


As to Clinton, I don't think anything about what Sanders is promoting compares. "It's the economy Stupid," was about jobs...not about inequality...not about unfair taxes or raping of the environment...just jobs and industries. Not that that's all bad as something to attend to, but to ignore everything else, from corporate consolidation to erosions of unions and social programs and regulations, to feeding into the incarceration state, was damn unfortunate, and came with exactly the high cost you say it did.