What unites Trump voters?

[Admin]

Useful point, this, if it is true Trump supporters are mainly drawn by his anti-trade talk..

What has been missing from 25 years of mostly unfettered globalization is an adequate safety net for American workers harmed by free trade. Washington offers a benefit known as trade adjustment assistance to workers who lose their jobs because of foreign competition, but it’s so small that the paper's author calls it “effectively inconsequential.” Employers, for their part, mostly rely on the free market to absorb displaced workers. But the market hasn’t been up to the job.

Corporate America is doing itself in—while Trump and Sanders capitalize - Yahoo Finance

Technology and globalization haunted dreams of American middle-class prosperity. Machines displaced low-skilled (and increasingly middle-skilled) workers whose routine jobs could be automated, and globalization meant the flight of manufacturing and service jobs to factories and call centers in emerging countries. The result was ever-widening inequality.

Q&A: Robert Reich on the ‘Vicious Cycle of Wealth and Power’ He Says Threatens Capitalism - Real Time Economics - WSJ

And then there is this:

For decades, people in rich countries have lived longer. But in a well-known paper, economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case found that over the past 15 years, one group — middle-age whites in the United States — constitutes an alarming trend. They are dying in increasing numbers. And things look much worse for those with just a high school diploma or less. There are concerns about the calculations, but even a leading critic of the paper has acknowledged that, however measured, “the change compared to other countries and groups is huge.”

The main causes of death are as striking as the fact itself: suicide, alcoholism, and overdoses of prescription and illegal drugs. “People seem to be killing themselves, slowly or quickly,” Deaton told me. These circumstances are usually caused by stress, depression and despair. The only comparable spike in deaths in an industrialized country took place among Russian males after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when rates of alcoholism skyrocketed.

America’s self-destructive whites - The Washington Post

However...

conventional explanation for this middle-class stress and anxiety is that globalization and technological change have placed increasing pressures on the average worker in industrialized nations. But the trend is absent in any other Western country — it’s an exclusively American phenomenon. And the United States is actually relatively insulated from the pressures of globalization, having a vast, self-contained internal market. Trade makes up only 23 percent of the U.S. economy, compared with 71 percent in Germany and 45 percent in France.

America’s self-destructive whites - The Washington Post