A recently-released research study sheds light on the values of white working-class voters in the United States and the reasons these voters strongly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
Three researchers from three different universities authored the study, titled “White Working-Class Views on Belonging, Change, Identity and Immigration.”
Open Society Foundations, a network of political organizations controlled by left-wing billionaire George Soros, funded the study.
The trio of researchers conducted the study by visiting a handful of places between August 2016 and March 2017: Birmingham, Alabama; Dayton, Ohio; Tacoma, Washington; Phoenix, Arizona; and — for some reason — the New York City borough of Brooklyn.
The researchers spoke candidly with over 400 people who identify as members of the white working class.
Here is what they found:
In 2016, Trump was the ‘hope and change’ candidate for white working-class voters
The participants in the study say they view Trump as “strong” and “hardworking.”
The Trump campaign “personified an insurgent, anti-establishment rage against ‘politics as normal,'” according to the study participants.
“In many ways, Trump was the hope and change candidate in 2016, as Obama had been in 2008, albeit representing different constituencies.”
Some Trump voters say they were “appalled by” some of Trump’s statements during the campaign but “they valued that he was a ‘straight talker'” who appeared “‘direct’ and ‘honest’ in contrast with his opponents during the Republican primaries and the presidential campaign.”
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White working-class voters strongly favored Trump’s stance against illegal immigration and his promise to abandon the North American Free Trade Agreement. They believe the NAFTA agreement has been the cause of factory closures across the nation.
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“Trump’s message — ‘Make America Great Again’ — connected with white working-class communities who looked back at a golden past and hoped for a better future,” the authors of the study say.
“The refrain ‘I feel like a stranger in my own community’ was repeated in each of the case study cities, lamenting the negative changes associated with increased levels of immigration and diversity as well as economic disruption.”
White working-class participants in the study speak of living “pay check to pay check” as a permanent economic reality. Economic crisis is always close. “The social mobility promised by the American Dream had been suspended and replaced by the lived experience of economic hardship.”
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Trump was able to tap into the economic and cultural angst of white working-class voters by speaking in terms of their values. “The sense that at long last someone had decided to talk about sensitive issues such as the impact of immigration on communities provided a basis for Trump to access a deep well of grievances and concerns.”
At the same time, the study found that many Trump-supporting members of the white working class hate Hillary Clinton much more than they approve of Trump.
Throngs of white working-class voters utterly detest Hillary Clinton
Many study participants describe Clinton as a duplicitous elitist who is “very much outside a core set of working-class values.”
“White working-class perspectives on Hillary Clinton ranged from visceral dislike to lukewarm support,” the researchers found. “Typically, the views expressed about her focused on being untrustworthy and dishonest, as well as accumulating a fortune from not working hard.”
Study participants strongly condemned Clinton’s use of a private email server as “a blatant breach of the law.”
An interviewee from Brooklyn summarized the criticism:
“Anybody else she would have been in jail. I am telling you right now, she’s nothing but a disgrace to this country and if she wins it’s going to be disaster and it’s going to be the same thing all over again. Politics aside, I can’t stand it! I don’t like her…she’s very smug.”
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White working-class voters view themselves as hard workers who value honesty
The researchers found that white working-class voters have a huge variety of backgrounds, education levels and life experiences. Their incomes vary pretty considerably.
The common denominator among people who see themselves as members of the white working class is a shared set of values. These values include an ethic of hard work, honesty and charity. Also critically important is an ability to provide for your family without depending on welfare.
An interviewee in Phoenix defines some of the tenets of white working-class voters thusly:
“Working class values? Well, you put pride in your work or your profession. You try to do a good job, you try to have good attendance, good work ethics. You know you’re dependable.”
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White working-class voters are sick and tired of political correctness and identity politics
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Trump-supporting members of the white working class also despise identity politics and they perceive the Democratic Party “as the party of identity politics.”
“Some in our study had grown up in staunch Democrat families and had previously supported Democrat candidates,” the researchers explain. “Yet the view is that politicians are more interested in looking after communities of color than white working-class communities.”
The three professors behind the study do manage to accuse working-class Trump voters of secret racism. The researchers chide their study subjects for using “racially coded” language “by referencing crime, welfare dependency, and competition for housing and jobs.”
The researchers appear to perceive themselves as being above any “racially coded” language — even though the words “white,” “black,” “Hispanic,” “Latino,” “Asian,” “Chinese” and “Muslim” appear a grand total of 537 times in the study.
White working-class voters think ‘white privilege’ is a bunch of idiotic claptrap
An interesting dynamic in the study is the way in which the researchers desperately want to inject both race and the concept of “white privilege” into the study but the study participants just won’t have it.
The study participants describe “white privilege” as nonsense.
“Participants felt they were struggling because they lived paycheck to paycheck, had two or three jobs, and worked hard to put food on the table,” the researchers say. “Their limited economic means and lack of upward mobility did not seem like white privilege.”
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While the study’s primary stated goal is to provide a deeper understanding of the white working class, an unstated goal of the study is to help the American left and the Democratic Party recapture some meaningful chunk of the white working-class voting bloc.
“The working class has been abandoned or exiled by the Democrats,” the study flatly concludes.
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More:
http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/14/ge...what-he-found/
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