As we look forward, our biggest priority should be specific action to resist and disrupt dangerous policies of the Trump administration and its allies. At the same time, it’s important to try to understand Trump’s win in order to build strategies, movements, and politics that learn from our mistakes. We must use the moment to create something better for the future.

Of course there has been no shortage of such post-election analysis. A great deal of it revolves around the economic factors v identity politics/racism/sexism explanations.

As a political/sociological question, that’s a debate that has launched a thousand dissertations, so I’m not looking to offer a definitive answer. But I do have some thoughts on the topic that I feel are being overlooked:

1. Economic and identity politics explanations are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are exactly the opposite: fully entwined. There is a caricature of people who argue that working class misery and the erosion of the middle class were important factors in the election, making it seem like an excuse for racism or a Marxist fantasy, because most Trump supporters are not struggling economically (at least relative to the rest of the population).

This caricature misses several things: First, the motivations of individual voters are not atomized versions of large social forces. (In other words, it is a mistake to treat politics as a matter of the expression of the acts of individualized consumers, aka a market/capitalist view of politics.) So while individual Trump voters may not be working class, living in the Rust Belt, or express their support for Trump in terms of economics, that does not mean that economic factors are not important.

Second, social forces are not transparently or rationally expressed by individual actors. So, for example, an individual voter may express support for Trump for explicitly racist reasons, but that does not mean that collective economic factors are not also part of both the reason for that voter’s support of Trump AND for their racism in the first place. The question is not a choice between economic factors OR racism/misogyny, it’s about how those things are connected and how they are complexly expressed in politics.

2. Many Trump voters likely will vote Republican no matter who the candidate is (clearly). That means that one of the important questions we have to answer is why those solidly Republican voters were willing to vote for a candidate with Trump’s record of racism/xenophobia/misogyny/bigotry. It’s possible that those voters supported him because they share those values. Many of those voters may not share (or may not think they share) those values, but they were willing to rationalize Trump’s rhetoric because they lack empathy for or knowledge of the experiences of people different from them. People in this category don’t understand why people would feel threatened or angry about Trump’s words, campaign, and affiliations.

However, there was a variety of motives for support of Trump and a variety of Trump voters. A very important category of voters that needs explanation is those that differed from the last several elections. Based on the polling I’ve seen, those voters fall into a few specific categories, including: 1. working-class whites, often rural/small town, who voted for Obama in ’08 and ’12, 2. African American, Hispanic, and Asian voters, among whom Hillary’s advantage over Trump was significantly smaller than Obama’s advantage in ’08 and ’12. It seems unlikely that these voters were primarily motivated by racism or sexism. As voters that swung from one party to the other, they had a major impact on the outcome. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/opinion/did-moderates-help-elect-trump.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=all

Other data indicates that the economic concerns of these groups were the reason for their support of Trump: “He made meaningful inroads with traditionally Democratic voters who earn less than $50,000 a year, are members of unions and attended “some” college but did not graduate.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/11/17/daily-202-democrats-angry-that-clinton-had-no-economic-message/582cffa8e9b69b6085905df5/

Overall, “More poor and lower-middle-class people voted Republican in this election than the last. More upper-middle-class and rich people voted Democrat. And union voters abandoned the Democrats dramatically.” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/donald-trump-election-polls-whites-working-class/

Consider the analysis of Democratic pollster (even though that is a dirty word now) Robert Gibbs: “Then you look at some of the counties in the middle of [Michigan], [and] so I was focusing on one that I thought was kind of interesting in Bay County. It’s up near Saginaw. It’s in the bay area of Michigan. It’s 95 percent white. The median household income is $45,000. The median home price is $93,000. And 4 in 5 people don’t have a college degree. Barack Obama won that county, a medium-sized county, by 3,000 votes [in 2012]. And Hillary Clinton lost that county by 7,000 votes. And so you think about, there’s just all this commentary devoid of real reality. That somehow there’s this big racist vote that came out for Donald Trump. Even in 95 percent white counties, that voted twice for Barack Hussein Obama. They didn’t become racist in the last four years. They didn’t go, “Well, gosh. We voted twice for the black guy and now we’re racist.”

In the same conversation, former Obama speech writer Jon Favreau (not that Jon Favreau) argues: “The thing that sticks with me is, if this was 2012 and she lost, you could say, “OK, [those voters] took a chance on Barack Obama in the middle of an economic crisis,” and then [say] “This was a racial backlash,” and stuff like that. But I keep thinking about 2012, like these counties did not elect Barack Obama once. They elected him twice. They had him for four years, four tough years where he didn’t fix everything, and they still said, “We want to give him another chance.” So I think when that happens you have to do some thinking about the economic message there.” https://theringer.com/keepin-it-1600-democratic-party-robert-gibbs-3dc1f5c4fbf9#.prnzkt7ug

Finally, the biggest category that needs explanation is people who didn’t vote at all. Turnout was way down, especially among Democratic voters (~6 million/10% fewer votes for Hillary than for Obama in ’08 and ’12), and it was down across all demographics. (In other words, turnout was not down because millennial Bernie supporters refused to vote for Hillary). Whether or not these voters were (de)motivated by sexism is a difficult question to answer, but there is strong data to indicate that sexism isn’t the most likely explanation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/16/sexism-did-not-cost-hillary-clinton-the-election/?utm_term=.d98674017c18

(Edit: whether or not turnout was down seems to be still unclear, per 538’s latest information. We probably won’t know the final vote tallies for months).

3. The argument for the role of economic factors is not about the short-term. One of the main counterarguments to the “economic factors” thesis I’ve seen is that the economy is doing better now than in ’08 or ’12 (unemployment is down, the economy as a whole is growing, etc.). While this is true, it misses the point: the economy as a whole might be doing better, but that does not necessarily reach the vast majority of the population. 91% of the gains in real income made since the Financial Crisis have flowed to the top 1%. https://thinkprogress.org/the-1-percent-have-gotten-all-the-income-gains-from-the-recovery-6bee14aab1#.hq6tyrv4k Unemployment might be down, but that doesn’t tell us much about the quality of those jobs (a job at McDonalds is not equivalent to a unionized job in an auto factory).

Even more important is the long timeframe of wage stagnation and the erosion of the middle class in the last ~40 years. Short term economic indicators don’t tell us much if anything about the kinds of economic transformations that can have deep impacts on voting behavior. For a person in a community that has been experiencing a long decline and collapse, more employment at WalMart is unlikely to be a satisfying or significant change in fortunes.

Also, even for people who economically are doing reasonably well themselves, globalization, neoliberalism, and rapacious capitalism have created massive insecurity and anxiety. That can be measured economically in the two-thirds of Americans who have less than $1000 in savings, for example. So while they may have a job and a house, the margin between maintaining their standard of living and falling behind has gotten smaller and smaller. The psychological impacts of the generalized erosion of the middle class, of precarious and contingent work, and of the loss of social support and community might be even more important for the middle class than objective economic indicators or conditions. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/15/rust-belt-middle-class-wiped-out?CMP=fb_gu

The upshot of all of this is that without a significant change in the economic program, narrative, and leadership of the Democratic Party, I think the reasons many people did not support Hillary will not be addressed. It’s either time to rebuild the Democratic Party around an agenda that includes economic justice and change much more fundamentally, or it’s time to abandon the Party for one that will. To be clear, this is exactly the opposite of a call to abandon racial or gender justice: economic justice IS racial and gender justice, and vice versa. We can have a movement that recognizes that all of these things are intertwined and that they all must be fought for simultaneously.

As Rep. Ruben Gallego (D) said, “The party started looking at people through interest group coalitions, and we thought, ‘If we talk to them all in different ways, that will be enough to cobble together an election coalition.’ But I think there is a common interest in our economic policies between the laid-off white worker in Flint, the African-American and the Latino in Phoenix.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/politics/democrats-economy.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

So, instead of competing to find the best single explanation, let’s look at this in a different way. What does an explanation mean for how we move forward? What does an explanation mean for how the Democratic Party and left politics in general need to change? How much does an explanation contribute to building a platform and a movement that will lead to the world we want?

This is why I favor a focus on economic dimensions of the problem: not because I don’t think sexism or racism were major factors, and not because I think the left should stop fighting for or downplay racial and gender justice, but because the Democratic Party long ago abandoned a left economic platform in favor of neoliberalism and partnership with Goldman Sachs et al. There is an opportunity right now to change that, to bring a truly progressive economic agenda to the forefront, and to build on the deep links among economic, racial, and gender justice.