Fresh Insights From the Poor Man’s Mark Penn
By 
It has been a while since we have discussed Niall Ferguson’s descent from respected academic into subpar hack Republican pundit. But I can resist sharing with this with you. It wasn’t so much “phoned in” as “staggered into the room and collapsed on the couch after its ninth martini”:
In his brilliant and prophetic 2011 book, “Coming Apart,’’ my friend Charles Murray…
Oh, Christ.
… identified the stark social division that is defining this year’s presidential election. Murray’s book was unabashedly about “the state of white America.”
Yes, this election is certainly about nothing but white America.
On the one hand there is a “cognitive elite,” who are educated together at universities like Harvard and Yale, then marry each other, work together, and live together in the same exclusive neighborhoods.
Concentrated in “super zipcodes” such as Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Malibu, Manhattan, and Boston, these people are politically more liberal than the national average, as well as much richer and more inclined to eat quinoa salads.
Here’s the thing: in the context of a national election, dwelling on “super zip codes” and Ivy League grads is silly. The jurisdictions cited above more or less guarantee, at most, less than 20% of the electoral college and 6 whole Senate seats. No national party is going to get very far just appealing to “super zip codes.” And even that aside, the argument is still bullshit. In 2012, Obama carried every single county in Massachusetts — running against the state’s former governor — a majority of counties and almost every congressional district in New York, and based on a quick count 40 out of 52 congressional districts in California. It’s not as if the Democratic party appeals exclusively to wealthy inhabitants of a few urban and suburban neighborhoods in these states. And — TRUE STORY! — even outside of the Back Bay and Williambsurg and Malibu and the like, there are people in these states who no do not subsist entirely on iceberg lettuce, Burger King, and Tim Allen sitcoms.
OK, I’m being a little unfair here; no matter how far gone he is, surely Ferguson isn’t going to give us one of those ultra-hacky “snooty, coffee-drinking urban elitists eat [foodstuff that sounded vaguely exotic 20 years ago and now can be found at pretty much every supermarket in Omaha] which shows how out of touch they are with Real Americans” deals, is he? I mean…
On the other side of this social chasm is a new lower class: white Americans with nothing more than a high school diploma, if that. They eat Chick-fil-A, not quinoa.
It’s like, how much more hacky can this be, and the answer is none. None more hacky. And I’m not sure what amuses me more — the idea that nobody outside of a few snooty zip codes as ever heard of quinoa, or that people in prestigious areas don’t eat fast food. (Shake Shack — a chain with perfectly decent burgers of comparable quality to Smashburger or Five Guys or whatever — not only generates huge lines and hype but has a star in the New York Times fer Chrissakes. Perhaps people in SUPER ZIP CODES spend more time feeding themselves guff about how the fast food chains they like transcend the genre or something, but that doesn’t mean they don’t like them.)
Fast forward five years. Murray’s disgruntled white lower class has now found its “voice” and his name, as you have probably guessed, is Donald Trump.
Except, of course, that this is just nonsense. Trump’s supporters have above-median incomes — sometimes considerably so — in literally every state. Donald Trump’s support is not largely about Fishtown. It is also explained to a much greater degree by racial anxiety than by economic anxiety. Why, it’s almost making me distrust Charles Murrary’s broad generalizations about fictional communities as an explanatory force for presidential election voting behavior!
Ferguson also believes Trump has a very good chance of winning, which is very reassuring. Sample analysis:
The second is the extent to which Trump will succeed in mobilizing white voters. There were 129 million votes cast in the 2012 election, of which 93 million (72 percent) were cast by white voters. Mitt Romney won 59 percent of those votes to Obama’s 39 percent, but still lost. However, if Romney had won a shade over 62 percent of the white vote he would have won the popular vote. To have won Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Iowa — and hence the electoral college and the presidency — he would have needed to do better than that, but not much better.
The thing is, the United States also has non-white voters who can potentially be mobilized. There are more of them than there were in 2012, which is why Republicans are aggressively trying to keep them from the polls. Oddly, Ferguson ignores them. I think I know why.
I leave the final word to Elon Green:
This is the worst sentence in recorded history. https://t.co/Qrgf7UnAwF
— Bae Talese (@elongreen) August 3, 2016