'American politics is outrunning the pundit class, which has lost a lot of ground tripped up on the delusion that this can't be serious...'

Nate Cohn, at the New York Times, tries desperately to smear Donald Trump's voting coalition as "racist." See, "Donald Trump’s Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat."

There's really no evidence for this, beyond correlating the geographic location of Trump's supporters with people who searched for "racial slurs and racist jokes" on Google. Seriously.

Althouse takes him to task:

Much of this article strains to find racial material, dragging in evidence of the Google searches in various areas. Maybe you can tell where the racists are by where people search for racial epithets, and then maybe Trump supporters in the same area are the same people who did the searches. Cohn concedes that this evidence is weak, but it's not so weak that he doesn't bother with it.

What stands out to me after reading the whole article, however, is that Trump obviously has a lot of support among a wide range of people, including many that you wouldn't expect if you've been relying on mainstream media for information: women, well-educated people, Hispanics. There needs to be much more serious analysis of what is going on. American politics is outrunning the pundit class, which has lost a lot of ground tripped up on the delusion that this can't be serious.

I think those "certain kind of Democrats" are the regular racist Democrats of the old-line Dixiecrat coalition. You know, the Dylann Roofs of the contemporary racist progressive voter base. Maybe those folks are really going to go for Trump. There's just little evidence here that regular non-Democrats are racist, despite Cohn's best efforts.

More, "Dylann Roof, Southern Democrat Throwback, is Drug-Addled 'Wannabe Emo Anarchist' with Androgynous Haircut."