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Keith Gaddie has "hung up his spurs."

The election expert from the University of Oklahoma no longer helps state legislatures draw new district lines to maximize their partisan advantage.

He was still wearing those spurs in 2011 when he provided data that helped Wisconsin Republicans enact a legislative redistricting plan aimed at maximizing their power for the foreseeable future.

But now he has reversed course and filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the practice is undemocratic.

The high court hears arguments Tuesday testing whether extreme partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional. The case from Wisconsin has the potential to radically reorder politics in America.

In the short run, if the court sides with Gaddie, Republicans would be the losers. In the last two decades, the GOP has greatly increased and entrenched its dominance in the state legislatures and Congress through the use of partisan redistricting. The GOP now has control of state legislatures in 32 states, covering 61 percent of the population, while Democrats control just 13 state legislatures, covering 28 percent of the population.
What is "gerrymandering"?
Partisan gerrymandering is a practice that goes back to the early years of the republic. It got its name in 1812 when Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry signed into law a legislative map drawn to benefit his own party; it included a district so misshapen that it looked like a salamander, and the term gerrymander was born.

Since then, politicians from both parties have practiced, denounced and embraced it as a way to leverage their power. In 2004, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, refused to outlaw the practice. But the fifth and decisive vote was cast by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who left the door open to revisiting the issue if a manageable test could be found for evaluating how much is too much partisanship.
What this case is about
Now the issue is back in the case from Wisconsin, where Republicans in 2011 controlled both the legislature and the governorship in a redistricting year for the first time in decades, presenting them with a unique opportunity for consolidating their power.

Working in secret, they drew new district lines that would, for the remainder of the decade, solidify their control. A week after the plan was unveiled, the GOP majority enacted it into law.

The plan was amazingly on target. In the next election in 2012, Republicans, carried only a minority of the state vote - 48.6 percent - but, as the GOP map designers had privately predicted, Republicans still won close to two-thirds of the state assembly seats, a 60-39 seat majority.

The tools the map designers used were not new - packing large concentrations of Democratic voters into a district to give the opposition party far more voters than they needed to win. They then spread out the remaining Democrats into districts where they would be clearly outnumbered (a practice known as cracking).

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The marriage of high tech and new data analysis
A divided federal court found that while these techniques were not new, something else was - specifically, high-speed computer technology able to spit out thousands of alternative maps that meet the test of having equal numbers of residents and instantly matching each prospective map with new kinds of voter data to project outcomes well in advance of any election - all with breathtaking accuracy.

Gaddie emphasizes that he didn't draw any maps himself. What he did was create ways to run thousands of computer simulations, analyze the data and give it to those who actually were drawing the maps.

"They don't ask, 'Is this fair?' " Gaddie observes. "They just ask, 'What does this do?' "

Lawyers for the state say there are reasons for the Wisconsin district disparities that are not partisan.

"It is a political fact that Democratic voters tend to be relatively concentrated in urban areas and the Republicans are relatively dispersed in rural areas," said lawyer Paul Clement, who represents the GOP legislative leadership, none of whom wanted to be interviewed for this article.

Wisconsin Solicitor General Misha Tseytlin will defend the plan in the Supreme Court. He will tell the justices there is nothing salamander-like in his state's redistricting.

"It is undisputed," he contends, "that Wisconsin's map here complies with all traditional district criteria."

But the University of Michigan's Jowei Chen, an expert on geography and gerrymandering, has a different take. After running some 200 potential redistricting maps, he concluded that the state's demographic geography accounts for only one to three more seats for Republicans, whereas aggressively partisan gerrymandering yielded a 10 to 15 seat GOP advantage in the state legislature.

Moreover, Chen said, the heightened partisan advantage split more counties and municipalities than any of the sample, less partisan maps.
Is extreme partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional? Can the courts really tell when a plan is extreme?
The legal question before the Supreme Court is whether such partisanship in gerrymandering is so extreme that it is unconstitutional. Does it deny citizens the equal protection of the law; does it deny them their First Amendment right of free speech and association by making their votes less valuable? And ultimately is that something a court can accurately measure?

Lawyer Paul Smith, vice president of litigation and strategy at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, represents those challenging the GOP redistricting plan. He will tell the justices the time has come for the court to act.

"There are now tests that were employed here to allow the courts to figure out what are the really bad gerrymanders," he said, adding that Wisconsin's is among the four worst partisan-drawn districts in the country.

The tests vary from a mathematical formula for measuring when districts are drawn to over-concentrate the voters of one party but not the other. There is also a broader and more conventional test for evaluating the degree of partisan redistricting, which was used by the lower federal court that first ruled in this case: 1. Was there discriminatory intent in drawing the districts? 2. Does the plan have a durable effect - will it entrench the same majority for the decade? And 3. Is there a neutral explanation for the way the lines are drawn, like the state's geography?

"When you have those three conditions, there ought to be a remedy," Smith said, "because what you have then is a sham of a democracy."

Election experts, including Gaddie, have filed briefs saying the technology now exists to answer these questions. But there are others who are not so sure. Among them is Princeton University's Nolan McCarty, who did not file a brief.

"I'm not saying that the Supreme Court shouldn't establish a principle against partisan gerrymandering, but I think it's going to be very hard to adjudicate in specific cases," he said. "Whether we can tell with any statistical precision whether or not a particular plan deviates from fairness in an illegal way is something that I'm a bit skeptical about."
Even some Republicans say the Supreme Court should act
Still, looking at the 53 amici curiae briefs filed in the case, 32 of them against partisan redistricting, it is striking how many Republicans, including current and former U.S. senators, governors and state legislators, are urging the Supreme Court to act now to at least limit extreme partisan gerrymanders. They say these asymmetrical systems have grown so exponentially that they pose a threat to democracy.

Among those are two former GOP presidential candidates, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Sen. Bob Dole, former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the former Assistant Republican leader of the U.S. Senate Alan Simpson of Wyoming.

Never one to mince words, Simpson says of partisan gerrymandering, "It poisons the system. ... It stinks!"

Less colorful, but equally firm is Republican Dale Schultz, who, for 32 years, served in the Wisconsin Legislature, rising briefly to the position of GOP leader. Schultz voted for the redistricting plan that is now before the Supreme Court, but he had second thoughts when he realized the enormous advantage it created for his party.

"The first big tipoff was after the [2012] election," he said, "when the Democrats had won a substantial victory in Wisconsin by, I think, 125,000 votes ... and lost a considerable number of seats in the legislature."

New tools to analyze voter behavior, "brought to bear with current technology amplifies what you can do in redistricting like we've never seen before," he added. "We've allowed technology and gerrymandering to sort of rob the people of their vote. ... Legislators are picking their constituents rather than constituents picking their legislators."
Watch what you wish for
Wisconsin Solicitor General Tseytlin, however, has a cautionary observation: "Not everything that one thinks is a bad idea is unconstitutional. We have a system where the courts have a certain bandwidth in which they can operate, and if there are no neutral principles that can be announced, it's better for the courts to stay their hand."

Supreme Court advocate Kannon Shanmugam agrees, voicing a further concern about the "inevitable politicization of the judiciary that's going to result" from "embroiling the courts in these quintessentially political disputes."

Some critics of court involvement point to an alternative solution adopted in some states: the creation of independent redistricting commissions to draw maps. At least seven states have adopted such commissions.

Most, however, were created by voter initiatives, over the objection of the state legislatures themselves, and only 11 states even allow such an initiative process according to the Campaign Legal Center.

A decision in the partisan gerrymandering case is expected later in the Supreme Court term.

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This Supreme Court Case Could Radically Reshape Politics

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Keith Gaddie has "hung up his spurs." The election expert from the University of Oklahoma no longer helps state legislatures draw new district lines to maximize their partisan advantage. He was still wearing those spurs in 2011 when he provided data that helped Wisconsin Republicans enact a legislative redistricting plan aimed at maximizing their power for the foreseeable future.

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The option to impose one's will on another is an option that position alone wrongly affords all too many individuals. Indeed this option to impose on, rather than work with, this option to impose on without any regard whatsoever for due process, becomes, in the hands of most, a license to harm, if not destroy the careers and lives of others. People do, after all, inexplicably lose their jobs; careers do get gently nudged onto the rocks; professional marginalization does occur; first-rate organizational, social and political initiatives do encounter untenable resistance, if they are not obstructed altogether; minority oppression does occur; individual whim decimates cultures and destroys countries.

There are some obvious explanations as to why individuals would abuse the authority associated with their formal positions. The existence of an altogether unrelated drive for personal gain would be at the top of that list, such as we saw unleashed through the financial sector before ultimately taking the form of the housing crash, which devastated not only America, but the global economy. I would further imagine that the existence of malice toward others characteristic of economic, social, political, religious, ethnic and racial injustices would be a close second. Now as much as we have just cast a wide net, something else I have observed, based on my work for over two decades as both an executive consultant within the business sector and psychoanalytical therapist, is that the majority of these abuses of position, as they present in their everyday forms within business, professional and political circles, are attributable to something far less sinister, albeit no less destructive. What I have been led to conclude is that managerial or leadership incompetence is a significant factor when it comes to such abuses within business, professional and political circles.

Power is that to which leadership necessarily defaults in the absence of being able to contain and process meaning with others and within oneself. In the absence of functional interpersonal [with others] processing and functional intrapsychic [internal] processing there can only be power. In the absence of functional processing and meaning there can only be the dynamics of imposition, will and power. We should add to this the alarming fact that many individuals, by way of promotion or other circumstances, eventually find themselves holding positions of authority that exceed their leadership/consciousness capabilities to function within meaning rather than power. Looking to current events, even after we allow for the normal restrictions of partisanship politics, does not the pure inanity of the debt ceiling fiasco provide us with more evidence of this point than we care to see? How could we not conclude that those holding positions of authority had exceeded their leadership/consciousness capabilities to function within meaning rather than power? With the stakes so high for the world's foremost economy and by extension yet again the global economy, in light of the leadership/consciousness vacuum, is it any wonder that for the first time in the history of the United States action, in the form of the downgrading of the US credit rating, had to be taken by an outside party to contain the chaos, to contain that which was not being properly processed.

So why does power corrupt? It corrupts because it gives license to unconsciousness and neglect. It corrupts because it licenses individuals to unilaterally, unreflectively and thus arbitrarily impose their will on others. It licenses individuals to impose their will without having properly engaged and processed through the Reality at hand. Power inflates the ego and through it the ego is erroneously led to believe it has the power to make people, ideas and even Reality itself disappear without due process. In the big picture nothing is further from the truth. Power corrupts because it gives license to unconsciousness, and in so doing it not only destroys the growth opportunity of the victim of such imposition, but no less the growth opportunity of the victimizer. Failure to engage another in consciousness, not only does the other individual harm, but it no less does serious harm to oneself, for in both cases the precious opportunity to extend consciousness by way of self-organizing nature is altogether lost, corrupted.

By way of power you corrupt; by way of power you are corrupted. By way of absolute power you absolutely corrupt; by way of absolute power you become absolutely corrupted.

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Why Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

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The option to impose one's will on another is an option that position alone wrongly affords all too many individuals. Indeed this option to impose on, rather than work with, this option to impose on without any regard whatsoever for due process, becomes, in the hands of most, a license to harm, if not destroy the careers and lives of others.

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Corruption.

For some time now I've been mulling how one might concisely summarize President Trump's sprawling scandals around Russia and his various shady business practices. And that one word, I think, does the trick better than any other: corruption.

And yet, America's corruption problem is far bigger than Donald J. Trump.

Trump is almost certainly already the most corrupt president in American history. Previous presidents notorious for corruption, like Warren G. Harding, merely failed to notice lawbreaking happening on their watch - indeed, the infamous Teapot Dome scandal was not even discovered until after Harding had died. Trump, in addition to a Nixon-style abuse of power to quash the Russia investigation, is openly using the presidency to enrich himself and his family. Some of it is fairly small-bore - like how he charges the Secret Service to use his own golf carts - but much is not.

No president has ever continued to operate a huge business empire while in office, as Trump is doing. The Atlantic counts up 44 separate large potential conflicts of interest looming as a result - and that summary is almost certainly an underestimate, because Trump still refuses to release his tax returns as he promised he would do.

The Constitution straightforwardly prohibits taking gifts, offices, or titles from any foreign power (without the consent of Congress). After all, you don't want a stooge of a foreign power in the highest office in the land. But Trump has no shame whatsoever. In fact, it's perfectly in keeping with his long career of blatantly violating the law, getting caught, and then paying a wrist-slap fine. As Matt Yglesias writes at Vox:

[Trump] is entirely emblematic of America's post-Reagan treatment of business regulation. What a wealthy and powerful person faced with a legal impediment to moneymaking is supposed to do is work with a lawyer to devise clever means of subverting the purpose of the law. If you end up getting caught, the attempted subversion will be construed as a mitigating (it's a gray area!) rather than aggravating factor. Your punishment will probably be light and will certainly not involve anything more than money. []

President Trump is very clearly corrupt. But America's corruption problem is also very clearly much bigger than Trump.

Punishment of white-collar and elite crime has been declining for decades. Whereas over 1,000 people were convicted of major felonies as a result of the savings and loan collapse in the 1980s, only a couple wrongdoers were even prosecuted as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. That despite the fact that journalists and private citizens - with no subpoena power - easily found the crisis was underpinned in part by mortgage fraud on an industrial scale. The best that could be mustered for that transgression and many other crimes - including money laundering for drug cartels and terrorists, tax evasion, and market rigging - were minor fines that often were paid by shareholders, not the culprits.

Why? Because, as then-Attorney General Eric Holder said in 2013, many financial businesses have become so big that it's " difficult for us to prosecute them." A somewhat more compelling reason can be found in Holder's post-government service career: He went straight back to the corporate law firm Covington & Burling, where they had literally been saving his office for him.

President George W. Bush was arguably tougher on Wall Street than President Obama was. At least a few bigshots were sentenced to prison as a result of the Enron crime spree, and Arthur Andersen, a giant accounting firm, was driven into bankruptcy for helping cook the books. In retrospect, it seems that was the last gasp of the dying rule of law when it came to white-collar crime.

Another factor that exacerbates this problem is the psychotic viciousness of the American criminal justice system towards people who aren't members of the elite. If you're a poor person who commits some minor crime, you can expect the prosecutor to try to force a guilty plea by keeping you in jail with a massive bail requirement, or by stacking up enormous charges to threaten you with decades in prison. But if you're former CIA boss David Petraeus and you leak code word-classified documents to your mistress, you can expect a kid-glove plea bargain for a little probation.

All this badly erodes the public confidence in America's national institutions. If it seems like the game is rigged, that's because it is.

Ironically, Trump got no small political bump from railing against the "corrupt political establishment." Democrats need to try the same strategy, only mean it this time. If and when they take control of Congress, they must investigate even if the trail of corruption leads to friends and party donors - as it almost certainly will. If they take the White House, they must start enforcing the laws against financial crimes and abuse of office once more.

A vigorous campaign against corruption slots in beautifully as half of a Democratic Party platform for 2018 (the other half being against TrumpCare and for Medicare for all). Yet Democrats must also admit that corruption goes far, far beyond Trump himself. He is just the avatar of a general tendency among the entire elite - of both political parties. To make a really strong campaign against corruption, Democrats must not only slam Trump's abysmal record, but also admit their record in this regard is less than stellar.

In other words, it's time to clean house.

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America has a corruption problem. And it's not just Trump.

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Corruption. For some time now I've been mulling how one might concisely summarize President Trump's sprawling scandals around Russia and his various shady business practices. And that one word, I think, does the trick better than any other: corruption. And yet, America's corruption problem is far bigger than Donald J.

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Photographer: Mikhail Metzel\TASS via Getty Images

In November 2013, three Russian political operatives flew from Moscow to New York. Over the next few days, the men toured Manhattan, took side trips to Washington and Detroit, drank vodka at a Brighton Beach restaurant, and had a guitar singalong with Russian emigres.

It was a whirlwind, but they had no time to waste. Their boss was Yevgeny Prigozhin. A lieutenant of President Vladimir Putin, he had ordered up a film depicting an impoverished and crime-ridden America. "We went to meet Russians who live in New York and find out what makes life painful there," said Oleg Matveychev, a member of the group.

Prigozhin and three of his companies were named in the indictment announced last week in Washington by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The prosecutors said he was one of 13 Russian citizens who defrauded the U.S. government in a multimillion-dollar conspiracy aimed at criticizing Hillary Clinton and supporting Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders.

The 37-page indictment describes how hundreds of Russians used social media, fake rallies, and secretive operatives in the U.S. to create "political intensity" among radical groups, opposition social movements, and disaffected voters. In 2014, the indictment says, several Russians traveled to the U.S. under false pretenses "to collect intelligence for their interference operations."

The 2013 journey, first reported by the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta and confirmed by Bloomberg, shows that those efforts were preceded by at least one other project. It also offers a glimpse of the multifaceted nature of a propaganda machine built by Prigozhin. Matveychev said the New York trip, aimed at shoring up domestic support for Putin, was initiated by Prigozhin with no Kremlin involvement.

Such an operation, though, would likely have been backed by Russian intelligence, according to John Sipher, a retired senior Central Intelligence Agency agent who oversaw operations in Russia. "They wouldn't waste that opportunity," Sipher said. "You don't travel to the U.S. like that without the support of the intelligence agencies."

'Putin's Cook'

A short man with a stony stare, Prigozhin is known as "Putin's Cook" because one of his companies, Concord Management, provides food services to the Kremlin. The Mueller indictment names that company's parent, a related catering firm, and another Prigozhin group called the Internet Research Agency that ran a vast troll operation designed to sow discord in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Prigozhin has known Putin since the 1990s, when both lived in St. Petersburg and Putin was the city's deputy mayor. Prigozhin ran a network of hot dog stands, and then launched one of Russia's first grocery chains, according to the Medusa Project website. In 1997 he opened a restaurant on a ship docked on the Neva River, which became the go-to spot for hosting dignitaries such as George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac.

These days, Prigozhin can be seen departing Putin's residences in a black SUV with flashing lights, a perk reserved for top brass. He's chummy with business leaders such as Gazprom Chief Executive Officer Alexey Miller, who once was seen dashing through a Kremlin corridor to hug Prigozhin. He guards his privacy fiercely. At an event with Putin, a reporter spotted Prigozhin and called out to him by name. "Who are you?" the man replied. "You must be addressing the wrong person."

The "Cook's" reach extends beyond the Kremlin's kitchens and internet trolling. According to three people familiar with the matter, Prigozhin controls a shadowy private military contractor called Wagner that maintains a training camp at a commando base in southern Russia and deploys mercenaries to eastern Ukraine and Syria. In 2016 Prigozhin was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury, which said he has "extensive business dealings" with the Russian Defense Ministry.

"Prigozhin is one of those people who managed to convert his personal relationship with Putin into economic and political influence," said Valery Solovei, a researcher at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations. "Putin needs people to deal with delicate issues, and Prigozhin could deliver trolls, mercenaries, and all kind of services."

Prigozhin has denied wrongdoing and any links to the Wagner mercenary operation. "Americans are very impressionable people," he told news agency RIA Novosti in response to queries about the Mueller indictment. "If they want to see the devil, let them see it." Prigozhin did not respond to e-mails seeking comment.

Around 2011 Prigozhin set up a web trolling effort with Putin's approval, according to a former Kremlin official. Prigozhin was the wizard behind the curtain, shaping the narrative as internet use surged and state media's influence began to wane. His machine was key in helping quell antigovernment street protests after contested Parliamentary elections in 2012, which paved the way to an extended term for Putin.

Dirt Digging

"He reads newspapers every morning, websites, watches TV," said Matveychev, who was part of the 2013 New York trip. "Then he gives his assignments: 'Look what happened in Syria. Write comments saying everything in Syria is OK.'"

The trip to the U.S. was aimed at kicking off a series of anti-American films, according to Matveychev. They shot footage across Manhattan, looking for "disadvantaged areas," homeless people, and what Matveychev called "dirt" that would cast America in a bad light. According to Novaya Gazeta, the team purchased U.S. SIM cards for their phones rather than using Russian numbers, and Concord employees back home were instructed not to directly contact the men while they were abroad.

Matveychev characterizes the American adventure as a one-time assignment that fizzled out when Prigozhin lost interest. The footage was ultimately used in a 16-minute documentary that has garnered about 35,000 views since Matveychev posted it on YouTube in 2015. He's working on similar projects to promote Putin's campaign for next month's presidential election, both at the Kremlin's behest and on his own initiative.

"Do you think I get money from the Kremlin for creating propaganda every day from dusk till dawn?" Matveychev said of the popular blog he has published since 2010. "I am an officer of the information war."
- With assistance by Irina Reznik, Stepan Kravchenko, and David Voreacos

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How 'Putin's Cook' Fed America's Appetite for Disinformation

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In November 2013, three Russian political operatives flew from Moscow to New York. Over the next few days, the men toured Manhattan, took side trips to Washington and Detroit, drank vodka at a Brighton Beach restaurant, and had a guitar singalong with Russian emigres.

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Around the world right now, one billion people are trapped in poor or failing countries. How can we help them? Economist Paul Collier lays out a bold, compassionate plan for closing the gap between rich and poor.

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Here's the United States government's official website: http://www.usa.gov
The three branches of U.S. government-legislative, judicial, and executive-carry out governmental power and functions.
Daily, Americans exercise their rights secured by the Constitution. The most widely discussed and debated part of the Constitution is known as the Bill of Rights. Belinda Stutzman provides a refresher course on exactly what the first ten amendments grant each and every American citizen.
Governments around the world do not always work the same. For instance, the Government of the United Kingdom is led by the Prime Minister, who selects all the remaining Ministers. The Prime Minister and the other most senior Ministers belong to the supreme decision-making committee, known as the Cabinet. The Government Ministers are all members of Parliament, and are accountable to it. The Government is dependent on Parliament to make primary legislation, which means that in practice a government must seek re-election at least every five years.

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How is power divided in the United States government? - Belinda Stutzman

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Articles I-III of the United States Constitution allow for three separate branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial), along with a system of checks and balances should any branch get too powerful. Belinda Stutzman breaks down each branch and its constitutionally-entitled powers.

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Executive Summary

The enduring loyalty of many U.S. white working-class voters to President Trump has puzzled some political pundits. A Quinnipiac University poll suggests that as of October 11, 55% of white people without college degrees approved of Trump's handling of his job, compared with 38% of the total population. Why has there been such lasting loyalty from this particular group - low-status white-collar workers and blue-collar workers? New research explores this question by looking back to Trump's rhetoric during the 2016 presidential campaign, when this group coalesced as the core of his political base. The researchers focused on his electoral speeches, as these are particularly telling of his vision of society and of his intended friends and foes. Friends and foes are central to his communication strategy, and also a central part of what sociologists call symbolic boundaries (or boundary work) - that is, to the distinctions we draw to categorize and evaluate various types of people.

hbr staff/belterz/Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The enduring loyalty of many U.S. white working-class voters to President Trump has puzzled some political pundits. A Quinnipiac University poll suggests that as of October 11, 55% of white people without college degrees approved of Trump's handling of his job, compared with 38% in the total population. His approval rate from the white working class has held steady throughout his first year in office ( it was 52% the week after his inauguration). At the same time, his overall disapproval rating among all voters has risen from 44% to 56%. Even Tuesday's Democratic electoral victories in Virginia and elsewhere may do little to move those most swayed by Trump's core messages.

Why has there been such lasting loyalty from this particular group - low-status white-collar workers and blue-collar workers with no college education?

We began to explore this question by looking back to Trump's rhetoric during the 2016 presidential campaign, when this group coalesced as the core of his political base. The full results of our study are available in the latest issue of the British Journal of Sociology. We focused on his electoral speeches, as these are particularly telling of his vision of society and of his intended friends and foes. Friends and foes are central to his communication strategy, and also a central part of what sociologists call symbolic boundaries (or boundary work) - that is, to the distinctions we draw in order to categorize and evaluate various types of people.

The text of Trump's campaign speeches gave us a detailed and extensive data set through which to examine this boundary work. This is particularly important given that driving and accentuating distinctions between segments of the population is central to Trump's presidential style and to the appeal he exercises on his base.

Our detailed, computer-assisted content analysis of 73 of Trump's speeches, accessed through the American Presidency Project, sheds light on his overall communication strategy. We looked at the words he used most commonly and how he used those words positively or negatively. We then examined how Trump spoke (both positively and negatively) about various groups throughout the campaign, and studied the exclusionary discourse he deployed in his bid for the White House. We focused on his references to groups such as African Americans, Hispanic Americans, "legal" and "illegal" immigrants, Muslims, refugees, the poor, women, and the LGBTQ community. What we found shows a consistent approach to leadership communication.

What Trump's Rhetoric Tells Us About His Communication Patterns

From our analysis of Trump's speeches, we can identify three pillars of his rhetorical strategy still in use by him today.

Moral absolution for his base of supporters, white workers without college degrees. We established that the word "workers" appeared more frequently in Trump's stump speeches than references to any other social category (except "donors"), and that these references were overwhelmingly positive. Most important, Trump addressed workers' concerns about their downward position in the national pecking order by removing blame from them. Previous research by one of us (Michéle) has found that being hardworking, responsible, and providing are the three most salient moral traits of both white and black working-class people. Being unemployed or underemployed is thus, for many in the working class, not only an economic catastrophe but also a moral one. Trump's rhetoric assuaged that sense of moral guilt.

More specifically, he repeatedly blamed globalization for deindustrialization, thus supporting workers' self-concepts as responsible, hard-working people who have fallen on hard times through no fault of their own. He also highlighted the structural character of economic transformations in rural and urban America and promised to create "jobs, jobs, jobs" as the key to restoring these workers' wounded pride and improving their economic situations.

Clear "foes" that can be redefined on the fly. In removing moral blame for unemployment from some workers, Trump systematically applied it to others. Most frequently, this "foe" was immigrant workers. While drawing a clear boundary around native-born workers, Trump often blurred the boundary between documented ("legal") and undocumented ("illegal") immigrants. On a consistent basis, he also negatively referred to Muslims and refugees fleeing the Syrian crisis. He explicitly described immigrant groups as taking jobs away from American workers and as claiming benefits like Social Security, which should instead go to more-deserving citizens who have paid into those programs. By targeting these groups as scapegoats, Trump reaffirmed workers' self-concept as the pillars of American society, at the same time as he discredited immigrants whom workers perceived to be their primary competitors in a fragile labor market. He also channeled workers' anger toward established politicians (and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in particular) for failing to protect the American economy.

More recently, Trump has emphasized a cultural message rather than an economic one. For example, he has defended the tradition of wishing people "Merry Christmas" (rather than the secular "Happy Holidays") and attacked NFL players for kneeling during the national anthem as a protest against police violence toward black people. This is another way Trump redraws the boundaries around certain groups - for example, his frame of pitting mostly black NFL players against their patriotic, largely white working-class supporters. Boundary work like this is also what turns something like an innocuous seasonal greeting into a fraught political statement.

Trump is also able to both include and stigmatize certain groups at the same time, instinctively drawing, redrawing, and blurring the boundaries between groups. For example, he frequently mentioned the need to protect all Americans from crime in the inner city, which in America has tended to be code for "black neighborhoods." As others have noted, this is a linguistic dog whistle that allows a speaker to explicitly include a group (as worthy of protection from crime) while implicitly stigmatizing that group (as causing that crime).

Trump has used a slightly different boundary-blending strategy since his inauguration. When a protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, ended with a white supremacist driving a car into a crowd and killing one person, he condemned the violence "on many sides," a way of erasing the boundary between the white supremacist protesters and the anti-racist protesters marching against them. In doing so, he may have aimed to excuse the white supremacists and avoid siding with the anti-racist protesters.

An emphasis on specific, shared class values. In the same body of work that identified hard work, responsibility, and being a provider as salient moral dimensions among the white working class, Michéle found that being a protector, having integrity, and being straightforward were important secondary moral values. (In Money, Morals and Manners, she shows that members of the professional class often value these things too but put a higher premium on things like self-actualization, being a team player, and avoiding conflict.)

Trump leaned heavily on shared working-class values in his campaign speeches, often in the context of a threatened America. For example, he often portrayed immigrants, Muslims, and refugees as direct threats to the safety and well-being of women and children. He depicted these latter groups as in need of protection against the threat presented by Islam, particularly with regards to individual freedom and other human rights. He also repeatedly affirmed that these same workers needed to protect LGBTQ people from the intolerance he associated with Islam. Thus, he made salient the masculinity of white male workers and their role as providers and protectors, one of the lynchpins of their self-worth. Trump also typically described African Americans and Hispanic Americans as Americans whose jobs and safety are in need of protection against globalization.

What Trump's Continued Support Tells Us About a Changing Electorate

Trump's framing of these various groups in his electoral speeches is especially noteworthy because of the strong contrast to how white workers perceived these same groups in previous decades. In The Dignity of Working Men, Michéle used in-depth interviews to investigate the boundaries that working-class Americans living in the New York suburbs drew toward various groups in the early 1990s. She found that African Americans and the poor were frequently singled out by workers as having a lack of self-reliance and a poor work ethic. White workers hardly talked about immigrants at all.

What could explain these shifts? Two factors are particularly noteworthy: After the passage of welfare reform in the 1990s (particularly the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act), and following the 2008 economic recession, workers became less concerned with the poor (the welfare-to-work law forced the unemployed to work in order to receive state support). They became more concerned with those coming into the country to "take our jobs." Post-9/11 anxieties fed their patriotic enthusiasm, which became a source of high status and pride, especially in a context where their honor as responsible breadwinners and hard-working people was threatened by economic decline. Together with the 2008 recession, this patriotism fostered stronger xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment. Trump's electoral speeches were thus perfectly calibrated to resonate with white American workers given their difficult position in 2016.

The resonance of these speeches was also made possible by the declining influence of unions, which have lost their cultural impact in conveying to workers where their material class interest lies, as well as in anchoring their sense of belonging and pride in being "labor." Trump provides these same workers alternative frames to make sense of their downward economic mobility and a blueprint for how to fight back against their sense of growing social marginality (as captured by the defense of "Merry Christmas") in the context of a declining America. The lasting loyalty of this group to Trump may be due in no small part to the continued resonance of Trump's rhetoric with their current predicament, as their economic position remains weak and their social status even weaker.

How to reach these voters remains one of the greatest conundrums facing progressives today, in a context where the U.S. media are increasingly structured around silos that feed political echo chambers. Trump, known as a master marketer, is betting against this happening, and he may well be winning that bet.

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What Trump's Campaign Speeches Show About His Lasting Appeal to the White Working Class

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Executive Summary The enduring loyalty of many U.S. white working-class voters to President Trump has puzzled some political pundits. A Quinnipiac University poll suggests that as of October 11, 55% of white people without college degrees approved of Trump's handling of his job, compared with 38% of the total population.