Marc Hetherington and Drew Englehart from Feb, but still quite relevant:
Those who provide the least resentful responses about blacks (“strongly agree” to questions 1 and 2; “strongly disagree” to questions 3 and 4) score at 0 and those who provide the most resentful responses to the four items (“strongly agree” to questions 3 and 4; “strongly disagree” to questions 1 and 2) score at 1. Of course, the average response for most people is somewhere in between. In the chart below, we display the distributions of scores calculated from the survey responses. The higher the bar is, the more people fall into the category. Blue bars correspond to white Democrats and red bars correspond to white Republicans. The panel on the left is from responses in 1986, the first year the items were asked. The panel on the right is from responses in 2016, data that were released earlier this week.
WaPo:
Americans, collectively, are not as angry as watching cable TV would lead you to believe. But many poorer, less-educated folks who have been left behind in the 21st century—the ones who have seen their wages stagnate, their opportunities for upward mobility disappear and their life expectancies shorten—are looking to disrupt a status quo that has not worked for them.
That’s what Sanders and Trump are both promising to do.
And that’s the main reason why Bernie beat Hillary Clinton in yesterday’s West Virginia Democratic primary by 15.4 points. He carried every single county in the Mountaineer State, which by every metric has been left behind. (Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, won 77 percent of the vote in the uncontested GOP primary.)
Fewer than 1 in 5 Democratic primary voters in West Virginia identified as “very liberal,” tying Oklahoma for the lowest in any of this year’s contests. Yet Sanders carried both states. In fact, Sanders won among self-identified moderate-to-conservative Democrats in each.
So how did the septuagenarian socialist do it? The bottom line is most people are not voting for Bernie because he is liberal. They are voting for him because they perceive his promised “political revolution” as a challenge to the system that has failed them.
This is an under-discussed topic here. Many Bernie voters here want to see a more progressive approach to foreign and domestic policy. That’s no surprise, Daily Kos being what it is. But out there in the states, many Bernie voters want the opposite.
Sure, if it’s a voter for your candidate, you’ll take it (I will gladly accept Republican and conservative votes for Hillary in November. If you want to be a purist, vote Ron Paul.) But don’t be fooled by propaganda suggesting all or even most Bernie voters want what you want, or that people in West, by God, Virginia voted for Bernie because they want single payer.
Bernie didn’t win West, by God, Virginia or Oklahoma on the strength of a progressive vision of America. He won it, and OK and a few other states on the basis of a rejection of the status quo that cuts across ideological lines, similar to Donald Trump’s voters. And in places like West, by God, Virginia, there are other factors in play: coal, disaffected white resentment and a bit of misogyny thrown in. That doesn’t mean we at Daily Kos vote for Bernie for those reasons, but it is a part of the broader Bernie coalition (and is, alas, a part of any voter coalition, Hillary included).
It won’t be enough to win the primaries, which have been effectively over for a month. Just keep in mind a Bernie vote doesn’t always mean what you think it means or want it to mean. That’s why it’s not shocking at all in West, by God, Virginia, you see these results:
Exit polls Tuesday found only 33 percent of West Virginia Democrats are committed to voting Democrat in November. Around 27 percent of the state's Democrats said they would vote for Trump and 36 percent said it would depend.
No, that doesn’t make Bernie a stronger candidate in November. No, it doesn’t mean Donald Trump will win (even if he wins OK and West, by God, Virginia). No, it doesn’t mean Bernie’s votes don’t count. No, it doesn’t mean that you should change your vote or that Bernie should get out of the race. But don’t read a Bernie win in a given state as a mandate for a progressive future, either. Some Bernie voters didn’t vote for that.
Take a look below at the Scalawag Magazine piece on WV.
And vote with your eyes open. It’s better that way.
Scalawag Magazine with a sympathetic and interesting look at West, by God, Virginia:
West Virginia is more than 51 percent rural, the third-highest rate in the country after Vermont and New Hampshire. It is 93 percent non-Hispanic white, and the black population is minute in most of rural counties outside the coalfields and the capital city, Charleston. It was an early epicenter in the national spread of opiate addiction and overdose. It has one of the oldest and least healthy populations in the country. The low support for Obama is typical of Southern whites and white people in some other rural areas. But those figures pop into view, along with many pathologies and varieties of deprivation, because it is the only state located (almost) entirely in Appalachia, with no prosperous new-economy regions or diverse cities to offset its rural core.
I voted for Bernie Sanders in North Carolina, but I can’t pretend that his fifteen-point victory in my home state is an embrace of his Scandinavian-style democratic socialism. Plenty of ancestral Democrats and alienated Independents who will likely support Trump in the fall voted for Sanders because he isn’t Hillary Clinton. But it isn’t as simple as that, either. Obama carried my little home district, nearly all white and very poor, in the general elections of 2008 and 2012. In my home county tonight, Sanders won 693 votes – 431 more than Clinton, but also 213 more than Trump.
West Virginia is neither a secret socialist stronghold nor a racist fever-dream. It is one of several bleeding edges of a sharply unequal country, where people who never had much are feeling as pressed as they can remember ever being. Some are bigots. Many are not. Some, no doubt, find that Trump’s cocktail of arrogance and disgust, grievance and triumphalism, reassuringly resembles their own psychic survival strategies, blown up into world-historical dimensions. Others are voting for the socialist for the same reason they voted for the Chicago community organizer: a desire for a more equal society, born out of the lived experience of inequality. Maybe future organizing and leadership, like the decades-long fight that first built the unions and the Democratic party in the coalfields, will show that they are not alone in that.
Nick Hanauer:
The Republican Party is coming apart, and Donald Trump is leading the charge. The GOP establishment, now aware of the existential crisis they face, is in full panic mode. Media elites and most of the punditry class appear to have been taken completely by surprise.
But this turn of events wasn’t just foreseeable — it was inevitable. Which is why I’ve been writing about it — and of all things, doing TED Talks on it — for years. (See Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming.)
The pitchforks are coming and Trump brought them. But I think that Donald Trump himself has far less to do with the fall of the GOP than the GOP itself. Because from the point of view of the typical GOP voter — their 99% — the modern Republican Party has been one of the most epic failures and betrayals of all time.
The modern GOP as a political construct has principally been an alliance between two interest groups: urban economic elites and rural social conservatives. The reason the party is disintegrating is that it has over-delivered to the former, and completely failed the latter.
Politico with whither Bernie after June 7:
A group of Bernie Sanders staffers and volunteers is circulating a draft proposal calling on the senator to get out of the presidential race after the final burst of Democratic primaries on June 7, and concentrate on building a national progressive organization to stop Donald Trump.
Operating under the assumption that Sanders will win the California primary but still fall far short of amassing enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination, the document calls for the Vermont senator to exit the race and launch an independent political group far larger than any other recent post-campaign political operations, such as those started by Howard Dean or Barack Obama.
Thomas Edsall:
As the speaker of the Republican-dominated House, Ryan could have posed a harder question: Do Republican voters “share our values and our principles”?
The answer to this question, based at least on the 10.7 million votes cast for Trump in Republican primaries and caucuses so far, is “no.”
But that’s not all. There is also strong evidence that most traditional public opinion surveys inadvertently hide a segment of Trump’s supporters. Many voters are reluctant to admit to a live interviewer that they back a candidate who has adopted such divisive positions.
In matchups between Trump and Hillary Clinton, Trump does much better in polls conducted online, in which respondents click their answers on a computer screen, rather than in person-to-person landline and cellphone surveys.
NBC News, reviewing Bernie’s win in WV:
While Sanders is likely poised for even more success later this month, with upcoming contests in Oregon and Kentucky, he has almost no chance of stopping Clinton from obtaining the majority of delegates required to clinch the Democratic nomination.
Sanders has consistently argued that his big crowds and small-dollar fundraising are evidence of a political revolution that Democratic officials are unfairly dismissing in favor of Clinton's political network. He also points to polls that show him performing better than Clinton against presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
That’s the argument. Keep in mind large crowds are partly a campaign decision of where you want to spend your money (rallies are expensive, a million dollar enterprise between renting the venue, security, port-o-potties, clean-up, etc. and they don’t just magically happen), often used to convey a message about momentum or popularity. If a campaign decides not do hold a big rally that doesn’t always mean they can’t, it may mean they don’t want to spend the money (and re big rallies, see below).
My feeling (oft expressed) is that the primaries have been over for a month. If Bernie wants to stay in the race, and if people want to vote for him, fine by me. Most people are turning to the general election. I will be, too.
NY Times:
Donald J. Trump’s behavior in recent days — the political threats to the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan; the name-calling on Twitter; the attacks on Hillary Clinton’s marriage — has deeply puzzled Republicans who expected him to move to unite the party, start acting presidential and begin courting the female voters he will need in the general election.
But Mr. Trump’s choices reflect an unusual conviction: He said he had a “mandate” from his supporters to run as a fiery populist outsider and to rely on his raucous rallies to build support through “word of mouth,” rather than to embrace a traditional, mellower and more inclusive approach that congressional Republicans will advocate in meetings with him on Thursday.
Mr. Trump’s strategy is replete with risks. Roughly 60 percent of Americans view him negatively, according to pollsters, who say more-of-the-same Trump is not likely to improve those numbers. While a majority of Republican primary voters said they were looking for a political outsider, Mr. Trump will face a majority of voters in November who prefer a candidate with political experience, according to primary exit polls and several national polls. Many Republicans think they will lose the presidency and seats in the House and Senate if he continues using language that offends women and some racial and religious groups [and everyone else not named Archie Bunker].
This is a guy who loves big rallies. If only he could find someone to film them…
Kathleen Parker, a Never Trumper:
Never mind the many elected Republican leaders who are distancing themselves from his candidacy. Not enough of them, to be sure, which is disgraceful and surely will be noted by historians as cowardly. My own running list of sycophants remains handy for the duration of their likely shortened political careers. Nearly half of voters say they’re less likely to support candidates who have aligned themselves with Trump, according to Morning Consult, a group that conducts weekly polls of 2,000 voters.
To answer my earlier question, the better candidates didn’t win because, obviously, so many of them siphoned votes from stronger ones, giving Trump the lead and all-important momentum. Thus, the constant refrain from Trump supporters that the “establishment” is ignoring the “will of the people” is true only to a point. Trump is the choice of a plurality of the GOP but not of the majority — a distinction with a crucial difference.
Bret Stephens:
The best hope for what’s left of a serious conservative movement in America is the election in November of a Democratic president, held in check by a Republican Congress. Conservatives can survive liberal administrations, especially those whose predictable failures lead to healthy restorations—think Carter, then Reagan. What isn’t survivable is a Republican president who is part Know Nothing, part Smoot-Hawley and part John Birch. The stain of a Trump administration would cripple the conservative cause for a generation.
This is the reality that wavering Republicans need to understand before casting their lot with a presumptive nominee they abhor only slightly less than his likely opponent. If the next presidency is going to be a disaster, why should the GOP want to own it?
Jonathan Chait:
Why did almost everybody fail to predict Donald Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries? Nate Silver blames the news media, disorganized Republican elites, and the surprising appeal of cultural grievance. Nate Cohn lists a number of factors, from the unusually large candidate field to the friendly calendar. Jim Rutenberg thinks journalism strayed too far from good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. Justin Wolfers zeroes in on Condorcet’s paradox. Here’s the factor I think everybody missed: The Republican Party turns out to be filled with idiots. Far more of them than anybody expected.
Pew:
Supporters of Donald Trump differ substantially from other Republican voters in many of their foreign policy attitudes. And these differences extend to their views of immigration and government scrutiny of Muslims in the U.S.
Trump supporters have a distinct approach to global affairs, according to Pew Research Center surveys conducted in March and April. Fully 84% of those who support Trump for the GOP presidential nomination favor building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. That compares with 56% of Republican voters who preferred another candidate for the Republican nomination – those who supported Ted Cruz or John Kasich, who last week suspended their presidential campaigns, or volunteered someone else.