Dr. Christopher Sabastian Parker is a professor of politics and sociology at the Univ of Washington. His first book, 

Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South won

the American Political Science Association’s Ralph J. Bunche award for scholarly excellence. 

He is one of the rare academics who back in Septener predicted Trump’s nomination and election. 

His approach was to trace the same 8000 multiracial multi educational voters, young and old, from 

before Obama’s 2012 victory to 2016.

 

How did he get it so right?  Parker shrugged, “It was a no brainer” given the facts. Arrogance or the straight goods?

 

What’s interesting is that no main media organization has approached him and he remains a voice in the wilderness,

as he was then,  Is it because he is African American or because Democratic liberals can’t stomach his findings?

 

“I get it, nobody wants to be told what they don’t want to hear,” Parker says. “People want there to be 

a more innocent explanation, about jobs or trade or something. But sorry‑, everyone — it just isn’t there. 

My plea to people is we ought to start focusing on what’s real.”

 

In a nutshell, Parker learned from voters that Trump won not due to job or economic anxiety,

not NAFTA or Obamacare or Hillary’s gender, but “negative racial attitudes fueled by Trump 

were a big motivator for poor whites but also) college-educated whites, too.”

 

In other words they valued racial resentment more than health care.

 

A substantial share of Trump voters “appeared to embrace a conception of American identity 

predicated on birthplace and especially Christian faith,” Parker’s study found.

 

On the heels of Parker’s work another comprehensive study, from the non partisan Voters Study Group, 

by the rightwing Heritage Foundation and liberal Center for American Progress, backed up Parker.

 

Unheard, Parker has been banging this drum for years. His 2013 book on the tea party, “Change They Can’t Believe In,” with professor Matt Barreto, used survey data to show it was not a small government movement as advertised. It was more about America being stolen from “real Americans”.

 

Their study says the story we’ve told ourselves — that working-class whites flocked to Trump due to job worries or free trade or economic populism — is basically wrong.  They flocked to Trump because of anxiety about Mexicans, Muslims and blacks.

 

“I’ve got three words for you: scared white people,” Parker says. What they’re saying is that worries about the economy, free trade and the rest were no more important in 2016 than in previous elections, but racial resentment spiked by Obama's election..

 

They’re not all racists, Parker insists.  But they are scared of “losing” what they consider “their” country 

to blacks, terroristic Muslims and invading Latinos.

 

In other words, as usual the Democatic Party leadership has it wrong to 

campaign purely on jobs and the economy and to ignore the “existential” threat whites feel.

 

How do good rainbow-coalition liberals like us deal with this painful, embarrassing thing we may have got so wrong?

Or is this just another poll we should shrug off and just keep on truckin’. ?