A lot of heat and spin on this subject.  Lot of investment in getting certain answers.  

There is a LACK of teasing out the real regional numbers from general polling.  So I wanted to put some links together that get SPECIFIC.

The Myth of the Rust Belt Revolt
Relative to the 2012 election, Democratic support in the Rust Belt collapsed as a huge number of Democrats stayed home or (to a lesser extent) voted for a third party. Trump did not really flip white working-class voters in the Rust Belt. Mostly, Democrats lost them. (Me: so it was a passive/aggressive sign that “we don’t like the dog food.”)

Graph 1…the Republicans’ gain(225K) in this area was nothing compared with the Democrats’ loss of 1.17 million (-21.7 percent) voters in the same income category(<$50K).

Graph 3…Relative to 2012, Democrats lost 950K white voters in the Rust Belt 5 (-13 percent). This figure includes a loss of 770K votes cast by white men (-24.2 percent). Compare that number to the modest gains Republicans made in terms of white voters: They picked up only 450K whites (+4.9 percent).

Democrats also lost the black, indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) vote in the Rust Belt 5, with 400K fewer voters in this category (-11.5 percent). (Caveat: Not yet broken out by state, to allow evaluation of voter restriction effects.) But even in states with no such laws, BIPOC turnout was significantly lower this election cycle.

Conclusion… The real story–the one the pundits missed–is that voters who fled the Democrats in the Rust Belt 5 were twice as likely either to vote for a third party or to stay at home than to embrace Trump.

…compared with 2012, some 500,000 more voters chose to sit out this presidential election. In the Rust Belt, Democrats lost 1.35 million voters. Trump picked up less than half, at 590,000.  If there was a Rust Belt revolt this year, it was the voters’ flight from both parties.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/the_myth_of_the_rust_belt_revolt.ht
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fladem, could you repost your chart to this thread?  

I will be adding subsequent links that can be discussed in their own column.

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