Studies shows racism and sexism were central to Trump's success, but he's broadened his appeal to many moderates

"Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory continues to confound election experts. How could American voters put such a fractious figure into the White House?" asks Thomas B. Edsall, a retired Washington Post political reporter in his latest weekly column for The New York Times, which often collects research and writing about American politics to explain causes and effects. "Three books . . . shed light on Trump’s improbable political longevity," Edsall reports. "Each points to the centrality of racial animosity."

The books are Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America by John Sides of Vanderbilt University, Michael Tesler of the University of California-Irvine and Lynn Vavreck of UCLA; White Identity Politics by Ashley Jardina of George Mason University; and Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity by Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins University. Edsall also explores other research that dives deeper.

The first book draws on responses to poll questions about “the importance of white identity, how much whites are being discriminated against, the likelihood that whites are losing jobs to nonwhites, and the importance of whites working together to change laws unfair to whites” and finds that white identity and “was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.” Edsall notes, "On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level." But he notes a research paper that says the key difference for Trump was an increase in racially motivated voting among people with only moderate racial resentment.

Those researchers, Justin Grimmer and Cole Tanigawa-Lau of Stanford University and William Marble of the University of Pennsylvania, "make the case that explanations of Trump’s victory pointing to the role of those at the extremes on measures of racial resentment and sexism, while informative, are in their own way too comforting, fostering the belief that Trump’s triumph was the product of voters who have drifted far from the American mainstream," Edsall writes. "In fact, the new analysis suggests that Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these voters suggests that whatever he represents beyond racial resentment — anger, chaos, nihilism, hostility — is more powerful than many recognize or acknowledge. Restoring American politics to an even keel will be far tougher than many of us realize." Perhaps forthcoming court proceedings, and the reactions of Trump and the public's reactions to him, will be the next chapter in this story.