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Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Wow, you don't use stats much, do you? I'm going to ignore all the strange data usage and focus on the substantive issue here.
One of the funny uses of a lot of data on economic anxiety is that people tend to use self-reported "concerns", as in the Pew survey, as a way of conflating worries about inflation and worries about unemployment, treating a bank CEO's worries about worker shortages as equivalent to his employee's concerns about getting laid off. The economy is a huge category that encompasses many often conflicting concerns, and so will always be on and near the top of the list. Immigration is a much narrower policy, and the fact that there is so much concern over a narrow policy set is an indication of a pretty unusual state of affairs.
But that particular survey doesn't hit all sorts of other issues. There is no question designed to ferret out a rise in white supremacy, an increase in anti-semitism, or any of the other concerns that I see motivating a lot of Republicans these days. You need a different data set to look at those issues. Given the ability of a narrow set of the electorate, to control a political party because of the intensity and focus of their concerns, and the general lack of motivation of most of the electorate, the presence of even 10% of the population, concentrating in more conservative states, signing up for white supremacism has a huge impact on the country.
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Actually, we share a similar view of stats. When the income numbers are self-reported, do you assume those any more accurate than any other self-reported number?
Try asking 100 everymen to give a definition of gross vs. net income.
The "economic anxiety" explanation of Trump voters was based on 2016 data. So you can eliminate the suggestion that concerns about inflation played a part.
Immigration is also a huge and multifaceted issue. And if you look at the poll cited, it's voters in general, not Rs or Ds. This means it includes concerns about immigration held by those who favor more of it, or are concerned about R attempts to curtail it. It's not an unusually high number of people who are anti-immigration, as you suggest.
There is no question to ferret out bigotry, I totally agree. And there never will be one. And this is probably the most significant hole in Ty's argument. It is necessarily based on a set of assumptions. Most notably, the unsupported and unsupportable assumption that because Trump voters aren't uniquely destitute, they must be racist. That doesn't even qualify as facile.
How does one create the binary that: If not (a) Economy; then, (b) Racism.? I could insert almost any issue into (b) and it would hold some level of credibility.
The opinions dressed as scholarship supporting the opinions of Vox and WaPo on this issue are not statistically sound. As Ty even admits, at best they show a correlation between higher incomes and Trump voters. You and I couldn't count the angles from which extrapolation from that to the suggestion that racism or "lack of status" was the primary driver - a suggestion I might add was stridently made by certain media outfits with a pronounced lean (both supporting progressive and neoliberal positions) - can be dismantled.
I don't know whether I've a strong or poor facility with stats, but I know one needn't know a whole lot to knock the plankings out of this dumb argument that "it's all racism," or "economic anxiety driving Trump voters is myth."
