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On Thursday morning the "Today" show had a segment with a psycologist who was there to guide parents on how to explain Hillary Clinton's loss to their children. "Well that is interesting, they sure didn't have a child psycologist on to explain to my children the loss of Mitt Romney, or John McCain. You just simply did not have that," said a suburban mother sitting in the waiting room of a doctor's office with the morning show streaming on the television. The young mother, an IT professional who lives in Pittsburgh, the "Paris of Appalachia," said she was stunned once...

My father-in-law grew up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment. He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side but none worked, so he kept...

As the reality of President-elect Donald Trump settled in very early Wednesday morning, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes summed up an explanation common to many on the left: The Republican nominee pulled ahead thanks to old-fashioned American racism. But the attempt to make Trump’s victory about racism appears to be at odds with what actually happened on Election Day. Consider the following facts. Twenty-nine percent of Latinos voted for Trump, per exit polls. Remarkably, despite the near-ubiquitous narrative that Trump would have deep problems with this demographic given his comments and position on immigration, this was a higher percentage of those who...

Michigan was the home of the original Reagan Democrats. Trump seems to have won there. This is a historic incident in American politics.

The eighth Congressional District of Minnesota is a working class area in Eastern Minnesota. It has voted for a Democrat in the last four Presidential elections. It has a Democrat Congressman and will likely be the most expensive Congressional race this year. Usually, a Democrat Presidential candidate would win. But a recent poll held a shock: Trump is up 12 points! And more: Trump is winning among women. And the Democrat Party is losing members. They’re becoming Independents. What The Data Says did this analysis of the Eighth Congressional District of Minnesota: – Trump is beating Hillary by 12 points:...

Laura Perrins: Working class men turn their backs on work By  Laura Perrins Something strange is going on with the working class men of America. Many in this class of men are no longer working, and it is not for the lack of jobs.As Charles Murray explains in White America – while upper middle class men (and their wives) work more and more, working-class men work less and less to such and extent that we must insert those quotes – the working class man, is now the ‘working’ class man. This phenomenon has caught the attention of the White...

They're known as some of the most inspirational businessmen in history. But the success of industry giants such as Sir Richard Branson and Lord Sugar is actually putting working-class boys off of further education. A number of high profile celebrities who have gone on to make their fortunes after dropping out of education or choosing to not go to university are inspiring young men to following in their footsteps, according to a new report.

During an era of headline-grabbing advances in medicine, the United States is experiencing a health cataclysm. The latest straw in the wind is last week’s report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that life expectancy for white women declined slightly from 2013 to 2014.

The Geography of Trumpism NEIL IRWIN and JOSH KATZ MARCH 12, 2016 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...

They are the children’s film characters loved by generations of fans, rich or poor, across the world. But the Seven Dwarfs, Bert the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins and others have been criticized for sending out the wrong message about poverty. Good-natured Bert, played by Dick Van Dyke, is too happy and carefree given the hardships of working-class life in Edwardian London, US researchers claim. [...] Researchers from Duke University in North Carolina looked at 32 films, many of them from Disney, that were rated G -- the American equivalent of U -- and had grossed more than $100 million...

Obviously frustrated by Hillary Clinton’s collapsing presidential campaign (her second in a row!), The Nation’s Joan Walsh, a frequent MSNBC contributor and high-profile Hillary supporter, took to her verified Twitter account Thursday to attack working class Democrats as racists.

A couple of years ago, I read a piece by Ramesh Ponuru, or Reihan Salam, I think. Or both. Yuval Levin may have been in the mix. Don't quote me on that. Google fails me. The thrust of the piece was that the GOP was not offering anything to the working class any longer. This was due, partly, to previous GOP tax-cutting successes; the working class had been largely excluded from having to pay federal income tax. They do pay FICA/payroll taxes, of course -- but those go toward one's own Social Security, theoretically at least, and not to the...

Lots of celebrating by Trump fans and despairing by Trump critics on social media today over this poll. It’s December, notes Philip Klein, and this guy’s now fully 20 points ahead nationally. And not only does he have a big lead, his lead’s gotten bigger: He’s up nine points since CNN last surveyed the country, thanks mainly to the decline of Ben Carson and Jeb Bush. His overall average in RCP’s tracker has now reached a new high of 30.8 percent. Trump critics have been sitting in the pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin, i.e. Trump’s supposedly inevitable slide...

Truck drivers, trappers, farmers don't rate in the eyes of our elites. A recent study published by the National Academy of Sciences, co-authored by a Nobel laureate, revealed a spiraling death rate since 1999 of Americans described as middle-aged (45 to 54), middle/working-class (without a college degree) whites (apparently self-identified as such). That is not supposed to happen to sizable demographic groups in our postmodern societies. The regression to shortened lifespans is more akin to the trend in the old Soviet Union than in the United States. The supposed culprits are inordinate use of alcohol and drugs (both legal and...

The disturbing evidence about the health of white middle-aged American working class, discovered and publicized this week by Nobel prize winner Angus Deaton and his wife Anne Case, is not tied to just one trend in the culture, policies, or economic factors at work within the United States. It is not the fault of one party or movement, but has multiple root causes. But it is something we all ought to be concerned about, both for the future fiscal and policy burden it represents, and for the broader lesson it tells us about how America is changing. The numbers clearly...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump clearly prides himself in shunning focus-group research. He refuses big campaign donations that he asserts make his opponents beholden to special interests. He seems to target no specific constituency. Many pollsters remain puzzled by Trump’s political appeal. “Republican support for Donald Trump just continues to grow,” said Patrick Murray, director of Monmouth Polling after its August survey, “with no clear sense of who his constituency really is.” Yet a constituency is emerging. Trump’s strongest supporters, roughly a quarter of Republican voters across the polls, are not dissuaded by any increased media scrutiny of their candidate....

In what could be a significant opening for the Republican Party, working-class Americans have largely abandoned President Obama and rejected his economic policies as they continue to suffer from the historically weak economic recovery, a new analysis of IBD/TIPP Poll data finds. By wide margins, this group is more likely than any other income class to say the country is headed in the wrong direction, the economy is getting worse, and they fear losing their jobs. Just 36% approve of the job that Obama is doing, compared with 43% overall, and vast majorities say his policies haven't helped the middle...

In 2016, especially after President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty, Democrats may be on even thinner ice with white voters, especially white working-class males. Though the mainstream media wants to gin up the narrative that Republicans have trouble winning minorities, the 2014 midterm elections again showed, as Politico noted, “that Democrats have their own significant demographic vulnerability: working-class white voters. Republicans won white voters without a college degree by 30 points, 64 percent to 34 percent, according to exit polls, equal to their margin in the wave election of 2010.” In addition, “support for President Barack Obama among working-class whites has...

Jewish life in New York is dominated by ritual. Holidays. A pastrami reuben on a hero at Katz’s. The reading of holy books in cycles that take a year (the Torah) or seven and a half years (the Talmud). And just as reliably, there’s the ritual of presidential candidates sniffing around for dough right after the midterm elections. That last one got going in earnest yesterday and today, with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas making a whirlwind tour of power Jews in New York City. Last night, Mort Klein’s Zionist Organization of America dinner featured Mr. Cruz, known for his...

For the first time, working-class whites make up less than half of Ohio’s eligible voters, part of a demographic shift in a key Midwestern swing state that is pushing political parties to widen their appeal beyond the once-dominant bloc. Nationwide, working-class whites—defined as those ages 18 to 64, with less than a bachelor’s degree—are more likely to be socially conservative, less optimistic about their futures and skeptical of big government. But in Ohio, the group has been much more politically divided: encompassing deeply religious, GOP-leaning conservatives in rural areas as well as unionized blue-collar Democrats in cities. Now, those voters...