You are still crying wolf, Scott Alexander laments:
Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.
Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don’t think we have official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in equal or lesser numbers this year than in 2012, 2008, and so on.
[EDIT: though see here for an alternate perspective]
The media responded to all of this freely available data with articles like White Flight From Reality: Inside The Racist Panic That Fueled Donald Trump’s Victory and Make No Mistake: Donald Trump’s Win Represents A Racist “Whitelash”.
I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up. It’s a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him. That it came to dominate the election cycle should be considered a horrifying indictment of our political discourse, in the same way that it would be a horrifying indictment of our political discourse if the entire Republican campaign had been based around the theory that Hillary Clinton was a secret Satanist. Yes, calling Romney a racist was crying wolf. But you are still crying wolf.
Read the whole thing.
It’s more like the wolf crying honky!
And since when are mere facts supposed to ruin a perfectly good witch hunt? Racist only means bad whitey at this point, and every honky who voted for Trump is a bad honky, by definition, it’s time to come down from our etymological high horse and face this reality.
Scott Adams claims this as THE definitive article to reprogram anti-trumpers:
“It would take me too long to explain why this article about Trump, by Scott Alexander, is so important to you and to the country. Stop whatever you are doing and give it ten minutes.
Seriously. Stop what you are doing. Give this ten minutes. It’s more important that almost anything you were going to do today.
Then save the link for later sharing. Show it to all of your friends who think Trump is a racist monster. This ends it.
The only people who will think Trump is a racist going forward are people who haven’t read this article. If you find someone like that, send them the link. This piece is a brilliant service to the country. Breathtaking.”
Data is from exit polls, which are done by the same people who consistently put HRC at +4-6 and thought she had a 70%+ chance of winning, i.e. not a solid foundation for argument.
One Steve Johnson, a commenter on Jim’s blog, has a more critical view on said article:
The exact comment which Jim himself later paraphrased as such: