It's the economy, stupid.

So went political strategist James Carville's famous dictum about the 1992 campaign.

The same has often been said about the 2016 election, with pundits insisting Donald Trump's unexpected victory was the result of widespread economic anxiety, especially among working-class white voters.

But a new study by three political scientists -- two from the University of Massachusetts and one from a self-identified progressive communications firm -- has reached a different conclusion. It found that Trump won because the country's "deplorables," to use losing candidate Hillary Clinton's word, came out and voted in unprecedented numbers.

The study includes a straightforward chart that, as the news-analysis site Vox wrote, makes clear that "voters' measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology."

Vox editor-in-chief Ezra Klein put it this way on Facebook: "The numbers here are impossible to read any other way."

That said, racism or sexism obviously did not animate all of Trump's supporters. Millions of Americans voted for the Republican candidate because of straightforward partisanship, because they liked his ideas on taxes or because, yes, they feared for their economic lives.

But the study -- titled "Explaining White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism" -- argues that the just-completed election was indeed different than previous ones, and in a very ugly way.

The Trump-Clinton race focused much more on issues of race and gender than other recent presidential campaigns. Clinton campaigned explicitly on the idea that it was time for the first female president of the U.S. Trump, meanwhile, made what many considered not-so-veiled appeals to prejudice (such as retweeting white nationalists and insisting in one of the televised debates that Clinton didn't have the "stamina" to be president).

Trump's margin over Clinton among whites without a college education was an astonishing 40 points, dramatically higher than the norm. To find out why, political scientists Matthew MacWilliams, Tatishe Nteta and Brian Schaffner used a national YouGov survey conducted during the final week of October to measure attitudes on race and gender. They zeroed in on questions about, for example, whether women are seeking "special favors" in hiring policies and whether white Americans or various ethnic groups are getting "more than they deserve." The study's conclusion: "We find that while economic dissatisfaction was part of the story, racism and sexism were much more important and can explain about two-thirds of the education gap among whites in the 2016 presidential vote."

This study certainly isn't the be-all and end-all on the subject of Trump's voters. Indeed, in one way or another, even the most rigorous social-science studies are incomplete or rely on inference. But that doesn't mean the data and conclusions in this study don't have valuable things to tell us. Read it and judge for yourself.

* "Explaining White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism"

-- Douglas Perry