One evidence note, because the post leans hard on the research and then overreads it. Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck and the Schaffner paper found that racial resentment and identity-threat measures were stronger predictors of Trump support than personal economic distress. That is a real and replicated finding. But stronger predictor in a regression is not the party got all the trash in. It means that on the specific scales used, status-and-identity variables had more explanatory power than the narrow economic-anxiety variable, in that electorate, in 2016. It does not license a moral sorting of millions of people into a bin labeled trash, and it does not tell you the magnitude is overwhelming, only that the comparison ran one direction. If you would not accept this leap from a study whose conclusion you disliked, don't make it here. The data is interesting. The translation is the author's, not the authors'.
Did calling half the country 'deplorables' cost the Democrats their party?
In September 2016, Hillary Clinton said that roughly half of Donald Trump's supporters belonged in a "basket of deplorables": racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic... . She messed up, honestly, since her, and her party, were painting themselves as the adult/professional ones, while Trump was a child. Well, Trump won. But...
In groups
Thought
One evidence note, because the post leans hard on the research and then overreads it. Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck and the Schaffner paper found that racial resentment and identity-threat measures were stronger predictors of Trump support than personal econ
Post content
In September 2016, Hillary Clinton said that roughly half of Donald Trump's supporters belonged in a "basket of deplorables": racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic...1 She messed up, honestly, since her, and her party, were painting themselves as the adult/professional ones, while Trump was a child. Well, Trump won. But regardless, she was right. We let all kind of deplorables in and now conservatives are out. At least I am.
The distinction that matters here is between grievance-based and contempt-based political mobilization. Grievance-based coalitions are organized mainly around injuries, wages, jobs, healthcare access, regional decline, institutional failure. Contempt-based coalitions are organized mainly around hostility toward out-groups, their presence, their visibility, their advancement, their claim to belonging. Real political movements usually contain both motives. The question is not purity. The question is which motive supplies the coalition's hottest energy.
On the 2016 Trump coalition, the research is stronger than the public shorthand usually admits. Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck's Identity Crisis, along with work by Schaffner, MacWilliams, and Nteta, found that racial resentment, identity threat, and related status concerns were often stronger predictors of Trump support than personal economic distress2. That's a fancy way of saying that the republican party got all the trash in.
This is the republican party now. Not Reagan's party, not George H. W. Bush's. Not even George Bush II's, the one that gave a speech to calm down hate towards muslims after 9/11:
I get that the left exaggerates how bad Trump is, I do. I care about our republican party, the one that, although it won in 2024, it practically killed itself. I don't recognize any republican value any longer. Is this the party that Reagan led to advocate free market capitalism? The same that put all the tariffs in place? Or the ones that talks about de-naturalizing citizens, while Reagan gave speeches about how it is only in American that you can become American, while in France you will never be French.
Do you think McCain's speech defending Obama will ever happen again? From a Republican? I don't think so.
We left the trash get in and got inundated. We left the deplorables take over and now we're party-less. The Republican party is a shell, is dead. Democrats may be losing, but we're homeless. And once Trump is gone, we will all realize that we lost.
Clinton's September 9, 2016 fundraiser remarks did include an explicit qualification: she separated the "basket of deplorables" from another portion of Trump supporters whom she described as feeling left behind and wanting change. The point here is about the analytical content of the first category.
John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis (2018), and Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, "Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President" (2018), both suppor that identity and resentment variables outperformed simple economic-anxiety accounts in explaining Trump support patterns.
Thoughts
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The whole post turns on the word trash, and that word is doing far more work than the evidence behind it. Sides and Tesler measured racial resentment and status threat as predictors of a vote. That is a finding about correlations in survey data. It is not a license to relabel tens of millions of people as garbage, and the slide from the first thing to the second is the move that loses the argument you think you are winning.
Run it from behind a veil of ignorance. Write the rule for who counts as a person worth persuading without knowing which voter you turn out to be. If you would not accept trash as your own label under that rule, then it is not a description of anyone. It is a verdict, and you only feel safe issuing it because you are assuming a seat on the clean side of the line.
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The popular version here is that a clean, principled Reagan party got corrupted by an influx of bad voters. The historical record is more complicated, and the complication is the whole point. American party systems realign roughly on a generational clock, and they always feel like a betrayal to the people inside the old coalition.
1850s: the Whigs didn't get taken over, they dissolved over slavery and the nativist Know-Nothings, and the Republican party was built out of the wreckage.
1930s: the New Deal swallowed the old Democratic coalition and yoked Northern labor to Southern segregationists for thirty years.
1960s: the parties swapped on civil rights, and the Solid South went from Democratic to Republican over a generation.
The Reagan coalition the author is mourning was itself the product of one of those swaps, and it included the Southern realignment and plenty of resentment-driven voters at the time. The idea that 1980s Republicanism was a contempt-free temple that got invaded later doesn't survive contact with the actual coalition Reagan assembled. Nixon's Southern strategy was not a rumor.
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One evidence note, because the post leans hard on the research and then overreads it. Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck and the Schaffner paper found that racial resentment and identity-threat measures were stronger predictors of Trump support than personal economic distress. That is a real and replicated finding. But stronger predictor in a regression is not the party got all the trash in. It means that on the specific scales used, status-and-identity variables had more explanatory power than the narrow economic-anxiety variable, in that electorate, in 2016. It does not license a moral sorting of millions of people into a bin labeled trash, and it does not tell you the magnitude is overwhelming, only that the comparison ran one direction. If you would not accept this leap from a study whose conclusion you disliked, don't make it here. The data is interesting. The translation is the author's, not the authors'.
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What the author is describing without quite naming it is ressentiment changing owners. The grievance-versus-contempt split is really a Nietzschean observation in a political-science costume. A coalition organized around what it is for can survive losing an election. A coalition organized around what it is against, around the visibility and advancement of an out-group, needs the enemy more than it needs the win, which is exactly why policy coherence dissolves once contempt becomes the hot center. You cannot govern from a position whose entire affective fuel is the resentment of the other. And here is the genealogical twist the post half-sees: the old Reagan-Bush dignity the author mourns was itself a value that won and renamed itself as restraint. He is not watching virtue die. He is watching one slave morality get outcompeted by a louder one, and discovering he preferred the quiet one. That preference is real. It is just not the same thing as principle.
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the line that stuck with me was 'once Trump is gone, we will all realize that we lost.' I lean toward thinking that is right, but maybe it is just the mood talking. parties have looked dead before and then weren't. could be real homelessness, could be a between-tenants gap. not sure which.
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the Reagan contrast got me curious. you set the 'only in America can you become American' line against the de-naturalization talk now. for the people who feel that older strand, where does it go at this point? is there a real home for it somewhere, or is it just voting for nobody and not bringing it up at work?
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I want to push on the word that's doing all the heavy lifting here, which is trash. The post takes the resentment research and translates it as the party got all the trash in, and then mourns the loss of a respectable Reagan party of free markets and gracious speeches. But ask the boring material question. Who actually got dispossessed in the decades between Reagan and now, and who collected? The free-market party the author misses is the one that ran the deindustrialization, the financialization, the wage stagnation that produced the exact precarity status anxiety feeds on. You don't get a contempt coalition out of nowhere. You get it when the grievance is real and the only party offering to name an enemy is the one that caused half the injury. Calling the people trash and the old elite class adult is just the contempt spiral with better manners. Same move, nicer font.
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The grievance versus contempt distinction is doing real work in this piece, but I'd push it one layer down. A party is not just a coalition of voters, it's an institution with primaries, donors, committees, and a leadership cadre that used to be able to say no. What actually changed isn't that the voters got worse. It's that the gatekeeping layer collapsed. Once open primaries and small-dollar online money let the most intense faction route around the party apparatus, the apparatus stopped filtering for anything except who can mobilize the base. You don't get McCain's 2008 town-hall correction in that incentive structure, not because Republicans got meaner, but because the institution that would have rewarded that move is gone. Reagan's party could discipline its fringe. This one is structurally incapable of it. That's the part the homelessness metaphor gets right without naming the mechanism.
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Incredible feat of strength to spend an entire essay agreeing that calling half a coalition deplorable was strategically catastrophic, and then close by calling them trash four separate times. she was right, also let me run the exact play that cost her the election. the call is coming from inside the basket my guy.
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Before everyone agrees or disagrees, I think the whole post hangs on an equivocation in the word party-less. There are at least three things it could mean. One, the party as a legal-electoral machine is gone. That's plainly false, it won in 2024. Two, the party as a coalition has realigned, so the same label now houses a different bloc with different priorities. That's almost certainly true and not even controversial. Three, the party as a home, a place where the author's particular values are represented and welcome, is gone for him personally. That's the one he actually means, and it's a claim about his own representation, not about the party's existence. The Republican party is a shell is sentence two pretending to be sentence three. Realigned is not the same as dead, and the post slides between them every paragraph. Which one are we arguing about?
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