Nancy Isenberg, Louisiana State University historian and author of White Trash: Part of the problem is the way the media has constructed Trump’s following. Are they working class? We know the working class today has a large portion that are women, that are people of color. But when you look at the images at his rallies—you know, people in their Bubba caps and their truckers’ caps—that fits into a certain stereotype: poor white working-class men. Educated women are clearly turned off by Trump’s, you know, blatant sexism. Although, I also read an interview of Arizona women who were supporting Trump, and it’s very easy for women to make excuses for men. It’s like, “Oh, yes, we know he’s rude,” but women are taught to tolerate obnoxious men. So, I think it’s really hard to say exactly where women across the board will stand at election time, because I also think that, you know, not all women are feminists. Women can often be more critical of other women.
Carol Anderson, Emory University historian and author of White Rage: And what about the data that shows the average income for a Trump supporter was $72,000? What does that do to the narrative that is out there that this is really the working class? Because we don’t understand the working class as having an average income of $72,000.
Case: Yes, that was Nate Silver’s study. The people who are actually voting for Trump, he argued, were the higher class than the people voting for [Bernie] Sanders and Clinton. So, I think our data is very imprecise here, and then, when we try to create a voting bloc and we use one term to describe them—whether it’s “the black vote” or “the women vote,” now it’s “the working class vote”—I think that can be really misleading.
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