(((David Shor)))Verified account

This seems a bit disingenuous. I can..think of another pretty big factor!

One way to look at his chart is that racial polarization continued on a very steady trajectory with a brief and obviously understandable interregnum of the only two elections with a black man on the ballot.

well but it's an interesting finding in that way! and you need to wrestle with it. maybe just *the fact of a black man on the ballot* is way more wildly racially polarizing than literally anything any candidate could say or do is the takeaway here

rather than the implied and sometimes explicit argument of "Trump had a lot of appeal to non white voters that commentators missed." ( I think it's probably both, but it's crazy to not look at the former case)

Trump did no better with white voters in 2020 than George Bush did in 2004 when he ran against John Kerry. His performance with white voters was basically that of a generic Republican. There's little evidence that his message had any special appeal to white voters as a whole.

George Bush got 40 percent of the Hispanic vote - more than Trump. Yet the commentary since November has been about some massive shift of Hispanics towards the GOP.