How to think about this election: white working class voters just decided to vote like a minority group. They’re >40% of the electorate.

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 9, 2016

Response to this tweet from 538

A New Narrative About White Voters

Is this right? If so, what does it mean?

Well, time for my mantra of the evening: We don’t know everything, and it’s not over yet. But this seems like a plausible way to think about this election. What it means seems fairly simple: Some subset of white voters is now conscious of a racial identity, and that consciousness is informing their vote. This doesn’t mean economic anxiety isn’t part of the picture; a sense of threat or scarce resources is often part of forming a group identity and acting on it politically.

Cohn’s idea also answers a question that someone (I think Rachel Maddow) posed on TV about half an hour ago: If the justification for Trump’s candidacy was that people are sick of Washington and want change, why aren’t more incumbents losing?