This is why I didn't get it when all the news outlets would make a big deal out of some racist thing or other that Trump did while campaigning, it was obvious that the demographic of votes he was trying to win was the racist vote. Like so many other things, the media just played into his hands and what would be bad press to anybody else made him stronger.
I'm not going to say that we are on the worst timeline, but I'd definitely like to be on a better one.
The media made Trump because he drove "engagement". Also, purpose of the whole media circus is to create an illusion of political choice. To that end they always drone on about being "balanced". If one guy says two plus two is four and the other says it's five, they'll report on the "contoversy".
I think the challenge in dealing with findings like this is that due to quirks of human psychology, this can be both true and also incredibly unhelpful to actually talk about. "You voted for Trump because you're racist" is not a line of rhetoric that has ever changed anyone's mind, because people will almost never frame themselves as being a bad person.
It's incredibly frustrating, but if you want to win those kinds of voters, you have to speak to them on their own level and in their own terms, and that will often involve having to ignore things that are true, such as this. You can of course decide that those voters aren't worth the trouble, and that's certainly the case for plenty of voters, but the mythical "average voter" isn't exactly going to be a saint and will absolutely be susceptible to the same social biases that the rest of us are, even if many of us like to pretend that we're at least self-aware about it.
The idea that "economic anxiety" means "poor people" is a liberal* distortion. Fascism is power protecting itself. It's the economic anxiety of the ruling classes, leveraging the spite of the middle classes in the aftermath of a global economic crisis, to distract from the perfectly reasonable idea that the rich should pay their own gambling debts and maybe shouldn't have all that power to start with.
"Look! Over there! The poor people have all your money!"
*liberal as in centrist; individualists with no analysis of power (and/or an unwillingness to challenge power)
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