Why aggressive economic policy is critical to defeating Trump

Liberals must abandon their position that the president's rise is basically all about bigotry. That's simply not true.

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images, Ralph Freso/Getty Images, jessicahyde/iStock)

Democrats have spent far too many of their waking hours since Nov. 8, 2016, in a semi-depressed state of wondering how, exactly, America ended up with President Trump.

This tired debate got a new injection last week, in the form of a study by Tyler Reny, Loren Collingwood, and Ali Valenzuela that examined the political attitudes of voters who switched from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. Writing up the study at Vox, Zach Beauchamp (not for the first time) claimed victory for the liberal position that Trump's rise was basically all about racism, saying the study provides "tremendous evidence that Trump voters were motivated by racial resentment (as well as hostile sexism), and very little evidence that economic stress had anything to do with it."

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.