What unites Trump voters?

[stpioc]

As recent research by economists Fatih Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, Jae Song, and Justin Weidner shows, lifetime income for most American men has been declining for decades; only by sending women into the formal labor force en masse have most American families managed to improve their material situation. Other researchshows that economic mobility and opportunity are declining as well -- most Americans are making less than their parents did, and those in the lower ends of the distribution tend to be stuck there. 

Rising inequality, stagnating income and reduced mobility seem like a toxic brew. And in the U.K., low income did indeed predict a vote for Britain’s exit from the European Union. But interestingly, the people suffering most from these trends in the U.S. don’t seem to be joining the supposedly populist revolt represented by Trump. Lower-income voters broke for Hillary Clinton in 2016, not Trump. More recent surveys also show that, all else equal, economic anxiety tended to push voters -- including white voters -- into the Clinton camp. 

That suggests that there are other ways to think about class in the U.S. The most obvious alternative definition is education. Many polls and surveys find that the college/non-college distinction played a major role in determining who voted for Trump.

Looking at a variety of other indicators, it makes sense to think of a college degree as the essential marker of class in today’s U.S. A college degree is an increasingly strong predictor of who gets married, who stays married, who is politically and socially engaged, and even who goes to church. Research also shows that especially among white people, college education is an increasingly important predictor of mortality. This is why the term “white working class” is often used as a short-hand not for poor whites, but for those who didn’t attend college.

Another class demarcation could be occupation. Much of the populist anger in the U.S. seems to center on the decline of manufacturing employment

Working Class Has the Blues, and Elites Lack Answers - Bloomberg