VOX
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Trump isn't a spokesman for the grievances of the financially struggling. Some of his supporters are poor, of course, but they mostly aren't. And most economically struggling Americans aren't supporting him. To understand the patterns of support and opposition to Trump, you have to talk about race.
As best we can tell from the data available in exit polls, the median household income of a Trump supporter is about $72,000 a year. [Or see Esco20; Pixnflixnwrites below] It's true that this makes Trump voters more downscale than John Kasich voters ($91,000 a year) but it's essentially equal to the median household income of Ted Cruz voters ($73,000 a year) and well above the $61,000-a-year median household income of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters.
Note that the median household income in the United States is only $52,000 a year and most people don't vote in primaries, so all of the major 2016 candidates turn out to have supporters who are more affluent than the typical American. Trump, in particular, built his big primary wins on the backs of people who are economically comfortable.
Trump leaped out to a big delegate lead by winning a series of mostly poor Southern states on Super Tuesday. This led to an early equation of Trump with economically struggling regions that was reinforced when Trump's single best county-level performance came in Buchanan County, Virginia — a hard-hit coal county in the southwestern portion of the state.
But this image of the Trump movement is out of date and largely a consequence of the primary schedule. Trump has now won Maryland, the richest state in America, along with Connecticut (No. 4) and Massachusetts (No. 5). California (No. 3) hasn't voted yet, but Trump was ahead in the polls there when his opponents dropped out. When New York voted, Buchanan County lost its status as the Trumpiest county in America.
The new No. 1 is Staten Island, an affluent suburban community with a median household income of $72,000 a year.
This is perhaps so obvious that analysts tend to skip over it, but it's important to note that Trump's approval rating with black and Latino voters is dismal.
His 77 percent disapproval rating with Hispanics, for example, was more than 40 percentage points higher than the comparable number for any of his Republican rivals.
The fact that Trump's support is concentrated among white people is important.
But we do know that the unusual geographic pattern of Trumpism — stronger in the South and Northeast than in the Midwest or West — corresponds to the geography of white racial resentment in the United States. We also know that Trump rose to political prominence based on the allegation that America's first black president wasn't a real American at all, and launched his 2016 campaign with the allegation that Mexican immigrants to the United States are largely rapists and murders.
We know that this kind of rhetoric does not resonate with nonwhite Americans but has appealed to white voters in the kinds of places — some poor, others affluent — where the level of racism among the white population is unusually high.
Trump represents, in effect, [the goal] of responding to the shrinking white share of the population by politicizing and mobilizing white identity ...That, in turn, reflects a broader trend in right-of-center politics that is also manifesting itself in different ways everywhere — from the UK and France to Sweden and Finland.