Law professor Joan Williams (UC Hastings) takes another stab at the topic, this time in The Atlantic. An excerpt:
An important, largely overlooked 2017 study by the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group identified five distinct types of Trump voters. Two of them—Staunch Conservatives and Free Marketeers, who together account for more than half of Trump voters—are unlikely to ever go for Democrats in substantial numbers. (Free Marketeers may not like Trump’s trade wars, but many cheer his gutting of regulations.) The other two big blocs, American Preservationists and Anti-elites, each include about a fifth of Trump voters, and believe that the economy is rigged in favor of the wealthiest Americans. (The final bloc, the Disengaged, accounted for 5 percent of Trump voters.)
American Preservationists and Anti-elites are often conflated, but they differ in important ways. Preservationists were actively enthusiastic about Trump: Nearly half supported him in the primaries and 87 percent said they voted for him more than they voted against Hillary Clinton. They were also heavily invested in nativism: 86 percent said being born in the U.S. was an important part of being an American, and 77 percent said the same about being Christian. Two-thirds considered race important to their identity; only about half reported warm feelings toward racial minorities. This is not a group Democrats can attract in substantial numbers.
Anti-elites—the Trump voters most likely to have bipartisan voting habits—are another story. Only a quarter of them voted for Trump in the primaries, and nearly half said they voted more against Clinton than for Trump. Compared with Preservationists, smaller percentages said that being born in the U.S. is important to being American (58 percent) and that being Christian is (49 percent). About two-thirds of Anti-elites expressed warm feelings toward racial minorities (though far fewer of them expressed warm feelings toward Muslims). Crucially, only 13 percent of them believed their children would achieve a standard of living better than their own. This is the group Democrats should target. But there’s one sure way to guarantee failure: smug condescension that lumps all Trump voters together as uninformed racists.
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