The Future President, Donald Trump

he is really one ugly mo fo.

The people who used violence to prevented Trump from speaking and his supporters from assembling have nothing to be proud of. It just shows that they don't respect freedom of speech or assembly.

Trump has disqualified himself from any government position by his racial bigotry and culpability for violence. He's not only stupid, he's a dangerous one.

Outside the South Carolina statehouse, William Bader stood tall and defiant as he brandished a large Confederate battle flag. It was not unlike the one embroidered on his black shirt, or the one a local honor guard recently removed from a flagpole outside the legislative building where he protested.

Bader, an imperial wizard in the Trinity White Knights, drove hundreds of miles from Kentucky – or, rather, “Klantucky”, as he quipped – to Columbia, all in hopes of defending the flag on a sweltering Saturday afternoon.

“They took our flag, so be it,” said Bader, a member of the Ku Klux Klan for the past two decades. “They’re taking our heritage from us. They’re taking the freedom out of America.”

More than a week ago, South Carolina lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to take down the Confederate flag from its prominent position on the statehouse grounds. The controversial decision, which followed a racially motivated 17 June shooting that left nine African American men and women dead inside a historic Charleston church, prompted competing rallies between white supremacist and black activist groups.

The Loyal White Knights, a North Carolina-based group thought to be the largest KKK faction, scheduled the protest to stop the removal of the flag. The group decided to carry on regardless. They received support from other KKK factions, National Socialist Movement members and Christian fundamentalists.

“The blacks have been out here attacking people, stealing people’s property, taking their flags,” said Steven Johnson, a South Carolina father of two who was among those waving Nazi flags during the rally. “I’m scared of what my family’s about to grow up with.”

The racial bigots in this country is represented by about 30% of the American people. Most live in the southern states; those who still fly the confederate flag.

When the Census Bureau asks Americans about their ancestors, some respondents don’t give a standard answer like “English” or “German.” Instead, they simply answer “American.”

The places with high concentrations of these self-described Americans turn out to be the places Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has performed the strongest.

This connection and others emerged in an analysis of the geography of Trumpism. To see what conditions prime a place to support Mr. Trump for the presidency, we compared hundreds of demographic and economic variables from census data, along with results from past elections, with this year’s results in the 23 states that have held primaries and caucuses. We examined what factors predict a high level of Trump support relative to the total number of registered voters.

The analysis shows that Trump counties are places where white identity mixes with long-simmering economic dysfunctions.


The places where Trump has done well cut across many of the usual fault lines of American politics — North and South, liberal and conservative, rural and suburban. What they have in common is that they have largely missed the generation-long transition of the United States away from manufacturing and into a diverse, information-driven economy deeply intertwined with the rest of the world.

“It’s a nonurban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “They’re not people who have moved around a lot, and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.”

The 10 Variables Most Closely Linked to a County’s Support for Donald Trump
A correlation of 1 means the variable is a perfect indicator of Trump support.* Negative correlations are shown in red.
VARIABLE CORRELATION
White, no high school diploma
0.61
“Americans”
Percent reporting ancestry as “American” on the census
0.57
Mobile homes
Percent living in a mobile home
0.54
“Old economy” jobs
Includes agriculture, construction, manufacturing, trade
0.50
History of voting for segregationists
Support for George Wallace (1968)
0.47
Labor participation rate
–0.43
Born in United States
0.43
Evangelical Christians
0.42
History of voting for liberal Republicans
Support for John B. Anderson (1980)
–0.42
White Anglo-Saxon Protestants
Whites with European non-Catholic ancestry
–0.42

Mr. Trump has his share of support from the affluent and the well educated, but in the places where support for Mr. Trump runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that didn’t finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.

Trump counties include places that have voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and the strongest predictors of Trump support include how a county responded to two very different third-party candidates: Trump territory showed stronger support for the segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 election than the rest of the country, and substantially weaker support for the centrist former Republican John B. Anderson in 1980.

Mr. Trump has performed well thus far in Appalachian coal counties and in rural parts of Alabama and Mississippi, which are coping with economic and social dysfunctions like high unemployment rates and heroin addiction. But the Times analysis also shows the common thread between those places and more urban locations where Mr. Trump has either done well or is projected to.

In Revere, Mass., a working-class suburb of Boston, Mr. Trump won 73 percent of the Republican primary vote. The Times’s model suggests he will perform strongly on Long Island when the New York primary takes place April 19 and in Ocean County, N.J., on the Jersey Shore, on June 7.


There were only weak correlations between Trump support and various measures of economic performance from 2007 to 2014, including the lingering damage from the 2008 global financial crisis. Rather, the economic problems that line up with strong Trump support have long been in the making, and defy simple fixes.

The high proportion of whites without a high school diploma in these places — the single strongest predictor of Trump support of those we tested — has lasting consequences for incomes, for example. The education pay gap starts small when people are early in their career before widening over the decades of their working lives. College graduates are less likely to become unemployed and more likely to find a new job quickly if they do, and they are comparatively few in Trump-land.

And in places where Trump does well, relatively high proportions of workers are in fields that involve working with one’s hands, especially manufacturing. The decline in manufacturing employment is not a story of merely a rough few years for the economy; nationwide factory employment peaked in 1979, and as a proportion of total jobs has been declining almost continually since 1943. Forces including mechanization and trade have put employment prospects in the sector in an ever-worsening position.

Likewise, a better predictor of Trump outperformance than a standard-issue economic indicator like the unemployment rate is a high proportion of working-age adults who aren’t working (the correlation was strong for both men and women).

Despite Mr. Trump’s racially loaded message on the campaign trail, and evidence that some individual Trump voters are driven by racial hostility, this analysis didn’t show a particularly powerful relationship between the racial breakdown of a county and its likelihood of voting for Trump. There are Trump-supporting counties where very high proportions of the population are African-American and others where it was very low, for example.

One of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants — and, as their answers on their ancestry reveal, they very much wear Americanness on their sleeve.