New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel spent all of 2015 in Iowa. He recently returned to the small town of Monticello to see how folks felt now that Donald Trump had been elected:
The Iowans I interviewed largely went about their lives outside the political hothouse social media….Many were hazy on specific policy details….These voters feared an outbreak of European-style terrorist attacks by Muslims in the United States, maybe in their own communities. And overwhelmingly, Trump supporters did not want their hard-earned money redistributed to people they regarded as undeserving.
There you go. Muslim terrorists and lazy black welfare recipients from the big city. Jobs matter too, but it’s not clear if that was really a big motivator compared to terrorists and welfare bums.
It’s worth adding that there’s nothing new about this, and Trump doesn’t seem to have appealed to this sentiment any more than previous Republicans. There’s plainly a racial component to voting for Republicans vs. Democrats, but it was no bigger in 2016 than in other years.
