The “Coming Apart” Election

There are some comments by Joel Gehrke at the Washington Examiner that conform more to my sense, such as it is, of what’s going on in this election cycle more than most of what I’ve read lately:

But 2016 is hardly normal, as is clear both from Trump’s successes and socialist Bernie Sanders’ durability in the Democratic presidential primaries.

“It’s a ‘Coming Apart’ election,” Republican political consultant Brad Todd said in a reference to political scientist Charles Murray’s study of the class-based divisions among white Americans.

Murray analyzed “the state of white America [from] 1960-2010” and found a new upper class had formed in that time — a cognitive elite whose smart kids go score high on the ACT or the SAT, go to top-flight universities, marry their college classmates and use their high combined incomes to buy houses in “Belmont,” raising their kids in only the most desirable neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, back in “Fishtown,” Murray’s name for working-class communities, those who struggled as high school students go on to struggle as adults. They are less likely than the upper class to marry, and more likely to divorce and to have children out-of-wedlock. They’re not religious. They are poor, either unemployed or working in low-skilled jobs at wages that have been falling since the 1970s.

They believe politicians are corrupt, but they’re not motivated by rigorous ideological narratives. They don’t have the elite education to do so.

As noted in the linked post, these people are natural Democrats who’ve been ignored by the elites of both political parties.