Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Actually, we share a similar view of stats. When the income numbers are self-reported, do you assume those any more accurate than any other self-reported number?
Try asking 100 everymen to give a definition of gross vs. net income.
The "economic anxiety" explanation of Trump voters was based on 2016 data. So you can eliminate the suggestion that concerns about inflation played a part.
Immigration is also a huge and multifaceted issue. And if you look at the poll cited, it's voters in general, not Rs or Ds. This means it includes concerns about immigration held by those who favor more of it, or are concerned about R attempts to curtail it. It's not an unusually high number of people who are anti-immigration, as you suggest.
There is no question to ferret out bigotry, I totally agree. And there never will be one. And this is probably the most significant hole in Ty's argument. It is necessarily based on a set of assumptions. Most notably, the unsupported and unsupportable assumption that because Trump voters aren't uniquely destitute, they must be racist. That doesn't even qualify as facile.
How does one create the binary that: If not (a) Economy; then, (b) Racism.? I could insert almost any issue into (b) and it would hold some level of credibility.
The opinions dressed as scholarship supporting the opinions of Vox and WaPo on this issue are not statistically sound. As Ty even admits, at best they show a correlation between higher incomes and Trump voters. You and I couldn't count the angles from which extrapolation from that to the suggestion that racism or "lack of status" was the primary driver - a suggestion I might add was stridently made by certain media outfits with a pronounced lean (both supporting progressive and neoliberal positions) - can be dismantled.
I don't know whether I've a strong or poor facility with stats, but I know one needn't know a whole lot to knock the plankings out of this dumb argument that "it's all racism," or "economic anxiety driving Trump voters is myth."
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If you spend a little time on google, you'll find plenty of surveys identifying increasing white supremacist views. But you've got plenty of other data points, from readership and/or viewership of things like the Daily Stormer, Breitbart, Tucker Carlson, to the votes for openly supremacist candidates to the increasing number of racially motivated or anti-semitic incidents.
