I think this Ben Domenech tweet is exactly right about respect and civic equality. I strongly suspect that there is a large cohort of Trump voters who are not partisan Republicans but who are going to stick with Trump no matter what happens because they know that they are despised by liberal professionals and tolerated as a necessary evil by the GOP (with the possibility that quite a few elite Republicans will, after the election, be emphasizing the evil rather than the necessary).

I think it works the other way too. Obama actually improved his margins among Hispanic and Asian Americans between 2008 and 2012. This was despite Obama’s facing much more difficult electoral conditions in 2012.

My suspicion is that quite a few basically apolitical non-white voters looked at Obama’s presidency as symbolic of the civic equality of non-white Americans in general.

Ideological conservatives (like me) tend to look at Obama (and federal-level Democrats in general) as being on the more post-nationalist end of the political spectrum, but we should consider the possibility that part of Obama’s electoral success was in being able to tap into the patriotism of people who saw the Romney-Ryan GOP not as the party of America but as the party of interest-group politics for the rich and of identity politics for the white.