This popular article summarizes a number of articles purporting to support the finding in the title of this post. The problem is that none of them have a sensible measure of "economic anxiety." That people are employed or currently making a good income does not mean they do not suffer from economic anxiety. Most people are in jobs that involve at-will employment, meaning they can lose their jobs at anytime and for almost any reason (apart from the legally prohibited ones, like one's race or gender or age). Given that fact, one would suspect almost everyone is some state of economic anxiety some or all of the time. But as far as I can see none of the studies control for this or take serious this possibility.
It is of course plausible that Trump appealed greatly to voters with racial resentment. We still don't know the cause, alas, of that resentment, and whether it is connected to the life-and-death struggle that is life under neoliberal capitalism, especially in this country. We also know that voters who supported Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 were influenced by the perception that the Democrats were beholden to economic elites (which is true, though somehow they didn't understand the same was true of Trump, if not quite for the same reason). Remember, the election was one by a slim margin in three states--Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where many former Obama voters (especially in union households) flipped to Trump in 2016. Were they motivated by "racial resentment"? Maybe, though there weren't racist enough to have been unwilling to vote for an African-American previously.
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