Bobos in Hell

Piecing together the ingredients of last night's disaster is going to take some time. The comparison with Brexit is clear but there's also the comparison with Silvio Berlusconi (seen here holding his Contract with the Italians during the 2001 general election). As with Trump, he was a businessman running a hybrid policy agenda and with an electorate that not put off by his flamboyance and ostensibly outrageous statements.

Anyway some other preliminary thoughts. Blaming the pollsters is really scapegoating for a failure of analysis and punditry which ultimately failed to understand how the Trump message was being received -- voters came to conclusions about Trump's words and actions that differed a lot from their content. The focus on dismissing his working class base as not having grounds for "economic anxiety" made an elementary mistake of confusing income level with class -- it's seemingly clear at this stage that there was a big anti-professional/ Bobo/ New Class element to Trump's voter base, which in turn is related to perceptions of who has gained and lost from globalization.