So let me get this straight. All research on the matter points to racial resentment as the driving cause of this election and american politics in general. Trump is the only one smart enough to embrace that as a primary strategy, and demonstrates its veracity by winning against all comers, to the "astonishment" of the establishment (that includes you). Remember that cognitive dissonance thing y'all like to accuse conservatives of? Well, it's not some kind of GOP-only disease, though even their estab clearly didn't want to believe it was so simple, too. Appeal to latinos when they can just do this instead? Ha, the fools.
Yes, racial resentment may have been a common factor among the Trump base support. I just think those supporters are strongly conservative and would have voted for any other republican and certainly not for Clinton. But they were not sufficient to deliver the election to Trump. Some independents and democrats were needed. At least some non-racists were needed. This election turned on a dime. Clinton may have actually won the popular vote by as much as 2 points as it turns out. The sliming of Clinton was enough, way more than enough, to deliver this election to Trump.
Another factor which flipped the election was Trump's wise decision to push an anti free trade agenda as a way to woo rust belt voters. Trump won Michigan, Wisconsin and Penn by very small margins. That single message alone was also enough to deliver him the election. Yet it has nothing to do with race.
As Nate Silver just pointed out in his blog, if 1 in 100 people had flipped back from Trump to Clinton, it would have given her 2 more points and won her the election. In that case, everyone's analysis would be different. We wouldn't be talking about how "racial resentment" won an election. We'd be talking about how it was discredited as an electoral strategy and this is the year of the woman. We would have been wrong. Broad, sweeping conclusions are not warranted in either scenario, because the demographic implications would be nearly identical in either a Trump win or a Clinton win, unless either had won by a landslide. Tiny, narrow shifts one way or another can switch an outcome, but they don't really point to a different analysis of the electorate. In such a close election, any of a number of things which are unique and particular to the candidates could sway the outcome. Like a single October surprise.
I recall after Obama won in 2008 all the liberal commentators triumphantly declaring that the GOP had gone into the "political wilderness" and how they couldn't win presidential elections any more because of shifting demographics. Then they got closer in 2012, and won in 2016. Because the truth was that Obama won in 2008 because of a collapsed economy and because he was a more savvy campaigner than McCain. It wasn't really a tectonic shift then, and it isn't really a tectonic shift now. It had to do with 2 specific candidates and the circumstances/backdrop within the narrow time frame of the election. But think about this: how could Obama have won twice, then Trump wins simply because of high racial resentment among white voters?
Trump's racial messaging may have fired up turnout among his base, or perhaps not. If you listened to Trump supporters, they talked more about despising Clinton than about any of Trump's messaging. Hatred of Clinton could also have increased their turnout. I support this theory because if racial resentment was what pivoted this by firing up the turnout on the right, you'd think a black man running would have done the same, but this turnout among rural whites was lower when Obama ran. Why were the bigots fired up enough to defeat Clinton in 2016 but not enough to defeat an actual black candidate in 2008 or 2012?
The approval ratings of our current,
black president were high during this election cycle. But Clinton's approvals were not. This is not explainable by racial resentment. Racial resentment doesn't make a white democrat fare poorly, and a black democrat fare well. It doesn't explain why the black democrat did better with
white voters than the white democrat. The simple truth is, Obama would easily have beaten Trump had he been allowed to run for a third term. But not Clinton.
And, if my prediction is correct that Trump will be a horrible president with mid 30's approval, and will lose by a wide margin 2020, then liberals will come out again and say his racial resentment is now discredited and the demographics have permanently shifted against the GOP, but the real reason will simply be that Trump just sucked as a president. Whatever the election result, too many people want to play amateur socialist and ignore the particulars of the candidates and specific circumstances of the election. Broader conclusions make more sense when one candidate wins by a wide margin, although it should be noted Obama won by a very wide margin in '08, yet the dems sociological analysis of that victory was wrong. Even there, it was more about the particulars.