It’s a truism of politics here and everywhere that voters will tend to vote for people like themselves.
White people tend to vote for white politicians, black people tend to vote for black politicians, as do Hispanic-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and, probably in the current case, German-Americans.
Trump did not run explicitly as a German-American, and neither did our two previous German-American presidents (Hoover and Eisenhower). That’s no surprise, given our two 20th-century world wars against Germany.
But still, voters vote for people like them, and it is probably not a coincidence that Trump did very well in states with a substantial percentage of German-Americans.
More, below.
The 16 states with more than 20 percent of German-Americans are, in order: North Dakota (43.9), Wisconsin (42.6), South Dakota (40.7), Nebraska (38.6), Minnesota (36.7), Iowa (35.7), Montana (27), Wyoming (25.9), Kansas (25.8), Pennsylvania (25.4), Ohio (25.2), Missouri (23.5), Indiana (22.6), Colorado (22), Oregon (20.5), and Michigan (20.4).
Trump won all but three of those states, and the three that put him over the top in the Electoral College by less than .5 percent in each are represented.
Much has been made about how the conservative tribalism created and propagated by talk radio and Fox “News” helped Trump. That’s an unfortunate fact of our current political life.
But an older form of tribalism may well have provided just enough in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to make Trump our next president.
FWIW, I believe there are plenty of other more macro reasons Trump won — Comey’s disgraceful intervention, the corporate media fixation on Clinton “corruption,” cable TV promotion of all things Trump, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc.
But in such a close race, in those three vital states, any little bit, like German-American tribalism, could only hurt.