If Donald Trump’s support really did come from his supporters’ economic anxiety, and not rage at uppity brown and black people, well … sorry, folks. You’re likely to take a hit. A lot of people got insured under the Affordable Care Act, for instance, and:
Odds are, a large number of those newly insured were Trump voters: An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 6.3 million of the 11.5 million Americans who used the ACA marketplace to buy their insurance last year live in Republican Congressional districts.
Policy analysts say that a rollback of the ACA would hurt older and rural Americans — two populations that favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.
And that trade war with Mexico Trump is itching to start by paying for his wall with a big tariff on Mexican imports?
"When you look at what Trump wants to do by restricting imports, your mind first goes to consumers. If you put a 20 percent tariff on goods coming from Mexico, it's a complete fallacy that this will be felt only in Mexico," Brown said. "These are products from cars to tomatoes — everyone's going to feel that effect," he said.
Brown and other trade experts point out that the brunt of this will be borne by lower-income families, since poorer people spend a greater percentage of their income on goods than their wealthier peers. And rural Americans, living in places with less population density and less retail competition as a result, are more likely to notice those increasing prices.
Of course, economic anxiety wasn’t the biggest part of Trump’s appeal—or anyway, the economic anxiety in question was anxiety that black and brown people might be doing too well—and people deep in the Trump mindset aren’t going to let themselves notice or accept that the bad stuff coming is because of their guy. So I wouldn’t look for a widespread change of heart just because Trump voters end up suffering in the Trump economy. It’s sad, because a lot of people are going to be hurt. But it’s more sad because they didn’t all vote for this.