From Jacobin: Good article on the electorate and the real hidden voter.

Who Put Trump in the White House? The Democratic Party has been collapsing for years, but no one noticed before Trump came along. by Kim Moody

Excerpt:

he media story in the days following the 2016 election was that a huge defection of angry, white, blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt from their traditional Democratic voting patterns put Donald J. Trump in the White House in a grand slap at the nation’s “liberal” elite. But is that the real story?

While he didn’t actually win the popular vote, Trump did carry the majority (58 percent) of white voters. Furthermore, he won the key “battleground” states in the Rust Belt that are the basis of the media story, which raises serious questions. Who were these white voters? Was this the major shift that sent Trump to victory?

Exit polls taken during the primaries, when the Trump revolt began, showed that the whole election process was skewed toward the better-off sections of US society, and that Trump did better among them than Clinton. Looking at those voters in the general election from the 26 percent of US households earning more than $100,000, who are unlikely to be working class these days, we see that Clinton got 34 percent of her vote, and Trump a slightly larger 35 percent of his, from these well-to-do voters.

In other words, upper-income groups were overrepresented in the voting electorate as a whole, and both candidates drew a disproportionate part of their vote from the well-to-do, with Trump a bit more reliant on high-income voters. This in itself doesn’t rule out a working-class shift to Trump, but the media’s version of this is based on a problematic definition.

Among other problems, a large majority of those without a college degree don’t vote at all. Furthermore, people who don’t vote are generally to the left of those who do on economic issues and the role of government. Of the 135.5 million white Americans without degrees, about a fifth voted for Trump — a minority that doesn’t represent this degree-less demographic very well.

Another problem is that there are only about 18.5 million white, blue-collar production workers — the prototype of the defecting white industrial worker. If we double this to account for adult spouses to make it just under 40 million, and assume that none of them have degrees, it still only accounts for a little more than a third of those white adults lacking the allegedly class-defining degree.

It’s worth reading in full. The author makes a lot of important points beyond just the composition of the electorate. To me, the most important is — and this is something I’ve been telling Democrats for a long time — the real untapped potential of the electorate is to their left, not their right, but they ONLY seem to want to look rightward.