Christopher Beem, managing director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State, was quoted in a recent San Diego Union-Tribune article about the 2016 presidential election. Here’s an excerpt:
“Trump’s win, he said, occurred through a convergence of economic and societal issues that were important to white working-class voters. Those voters, Beem said, were driven by their anger over feeling abandoned by corporate America and government and their resentment over transgender and movements such as Black Lives Matter. Those sentiments, he said, then were lumped on top of a dislike for Hillary Clinton, and that dislike grew after FBI Director James Comey’s announcement 10 days before the election that he was renewing a probe of Clinton’s emails.
“ ‘All of those things were factors but how you would begin to parse them out and assign percentages, I have no idea,’ Beem said. ‘I think a lot of people hear “transgender bathrooms” and that’s too much, I can’t accept that. All of those things come together to create this feeling of “This isn’t my country anymore and it makes me angry and this is my opportunity to express my anger.” ’ ”
Read more at SanDiegoTribune.com.
