Racial Identity Emerges as Main Driver of Voter Choice — Now? Just Now?

This is interesting.

And what's especially interesting is how the MSM establishment talks about how "racial voting" is something new all of a sudden. I guess the topic wasn't all that compelling when 95 percent of blacks voted for Obama in 2008, and 92 percent did so again in 2012. But hey, white working class voters are all in for Donald Trump, so now it's a phenomenon.

At the New York Times (where else?), "Racial Identity, and Its Hostilities, Return to American Politics":

Why do working-class Americans vote as they do?

The question has long bedeviled analysts on the left, troubled that people who would largely benefit from a more robust government seem so often to vote for right-leaning politicians eager to cut federal programs to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

The unusual Republican presidential primary, evolving from one surprise to the next, has revived the debate, but with an important racial coda. As Donald Trump and Ted Cruz surge in the polls, buoyed by the enthusiastic support of angry white men, they raise a narrower question: What’s going on with working-class whites?

Though subtle, this variation reflects an important shift in American politics: Perhaps even more than economic status, racial, ethnic and cultural identity is becoming a main driver of political choice.

It suggests that the battle over the purpose and configuration of the American government — what it’s for, who it serves — may become more openly about “us” versus “them,” along ethnic lines.

Consider the Trump phenomenon. While polls find that he also leads the Republican pack among women and higher-income voters, by far his most solid support comes from less educated, lower-income white men, according to a Pew Research Center analysis conducted in October.

Donald Trump is backed by 43 percent of Republicans with at most a high school education, but only 28 percent of those with bachelor degrees and 21 percent of those with some graduate school, according to an analysis of the most recent New York Times/CBS poll.

Similarly, a Quinnipiac University poll last month found that Hillary Clinton would readily beat Mr. Trump in a general election among college-educated voters, while Mr. Trump would eke out victory among those without a college degree. This is also true of the other angry Republican at the top of the list, Senator Ted Cruz.

Their supporters are overwhelmingly white. White non-Hispanics are the only ethnic group that leans Republican, according to a study of party affiliation by the Pew center. White men who have not completed college favor the G.O.P. over the Democratic Party by 54 to 33 percent.

President Obama and Bernie Sanders have speculated that frustration over lost jobs and stagnant wages can explain much of the blue-collar support for Mr. Trump and conservative populists more generally.

The explanation, however, is not quite satisfactory. As Matthew Yglesias at Vox suggests, many white Americans are most likely drawn to Mr. Trump’s xenophobic, anti-immigrant message because they agree with it...

Well, dang, if Matthew Yglesias says that white working class voters are drawn to "Trump's xenophobic, anti-immigrant message," then that's a freakin' explanatory law of groundbreaking scholarly importance. Give that man an award!

Keep reading, FWIW.

(Oh, and keep in mind the notion of voters segregating themselves into cultural and ideological tribes isn't really new. It's been going on throughout the Obama interregnum [at least], and started with the aforementioned black racial voting for Obama. It's just news when the white oppressor class gets its collective nostrils bent out of their proper alignment.)