Whites’ Unease Shadows the Politics of a More Diverse America
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In 1985, the pollster Stanley Greenberg went to Macomb County, Mich., to figure out how a traditionally Democratic suburban area could have delivered a landslide for Ronald Reagan. Last year, he was back with a similar question: How could voters in a county that turned out twice for Barack Obama have defected in such large numbers that they arguably delivered Michigan to Donald Trump?
The research zeroed in on white Trump voters without a bachelor’s degree who were either Democrats or independents and had voted for Mr. Obama at least once. Focus groups detected the same underlying theme that had motivated the Reagan Democrats more than 30 years before: a view of America as divided between “us” — white, struggling and aggrieved — and a nonwhite “them.”
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