The right-wing racism-xenophobia is only one part of the story. I buy into that viewpoint--I am a Lefty after all (by the way last Saturday was international left-handers day). Krugman only emphasizes one side of the picture in his condemnatory rhetoric. He omits from any apparent consideration the horrors to be inflicted upon us by ISDS.

Remember Brexit? Wasn't that long ago that the Smart People (mainly in the UK) harped on the same right-wing prejudice meme while completely ignoring what a large part of the population--those on the left--wanted. They wanted to be free of interference with national sovereignty = domestic decision making by and for the people. The EU has its own version of ISDS, though not as potentially horrible as ISDS. Most Brits wanted out--and out they went.

Well, it's true on the other side of the pond that many lefties want nothing to do with TPP which has absolutely nothing to do with racism and/or xenophobia.

From the linked Krugman article:

“Economic anxiety is not a very good predictor of who’s a Trump supporter,” Krugman said during an interview on Bloomberg TV. “Racial antagonism is a good indicator of who’s a Trump supporter.”

He is WRONG. There are plenty of racists flocking to Trump--I don't deny that. Krugman is in the rarefied bubble that the "Remain" Brexit backers were. Economic anxiety is a good indication of why some people are perhaps grudgingly attracted to Trump. Most people know the Hillary's "opposition" is bogus--as is everything she says. When "pundits", even Nobel Prize winning ones say such obviously half-truths, they lose credibility. Also losing credibility is the Nobel Foundation for bestowing the Peace Prize on war-mongering Obama.

When Obama was first elected, Krugman was especially harsh on him for his right-wing turn in solving the Great Recession. Almost 8 years later, and for a lot of people, nothing has really changed. Now Hilary is running on basically the same platform. And Krugman has his lips sewed to her ass. So, who is the racist, Krugman?

The Baseline Scenario has a couple of good posts on this as well.

He goes after another MSL (Mainstream Liberal) columnist, Matthew Yglesias, for the same take as Krugman, and takes him down a peg or two, to wit:

It’s understandable where this particularly highbrow putdown (also used by other twitterers) came from. Belittling the economic anxiety explanation has two understandable if not entirely pure motivations. One is the idea that chalking up Trump’s success to economic factors minimizes the central role of racism in his campaign; pointing out other reasons people might have for voting Trump distracts from the main issue or can even be seen (in an illogical sort of way) as an apology for Trump’s racism. The second motivation is that, since Hillary Clinton decided to run on the poorly worded “America is already great” theme, talking about economic insecurity only plays into the hands of the enemy; instead, we should just pretend everything is hunky-dory. (Yglesias does not share this second motivation.) But to many people, including me, it seems bizarre to insist that economic anxiety has nothing to do with Trump’s success, and much simpler to simply acknowledge that some of his voters are racists, some are worried about their economic prospects, and some are both.

[C]onsider the racial dimension. The fact that Trump has less support among nonwhites is explained by the fact that he is a Republican and a racist. Let’s say there is such a thing as economic anxiety, and it makes you more likely to be a Trump supporter. African-Americans are somewhat more likely to have economic anxiety, so more of them should vote Trump, all other things being equal. That’s Yglesias’s point. But other things aren’t equal; being African-American makes you much, much less likely to be a Trump supporter for other reasons (party, racism). Add those factors together, and voilà! Trump has better numbers among whites than among African-Americans. This is entirely consistent with the economic anxiety interpretation. (Conceptually, Yglesias is using race as an instrument for economic anxiety when the dependent variable is Trump support. This only works if race has no effect on Trump support other than via economic anxiety.)

[W]hile it is true that Trump runs better among whites than blacks, the question should be: relative to what? I don’t place a lot of faith in poll breakouts (low sample sizes), but it’s not clear he’s doing better among whites (or old people) than Mitt Romney did in 2012, and he may be doing considerably worse. That comparison is complicated by the fact that Barack Obama is himself African-American. But if anything, the poll data (which, again, I am not convinced by) tend to undermine the idea that this is an election about white privilege.

[T]here are many reasons to think that insecurity, economic or otherwise, makes people more receptive to racial appeals. See, for example, the relative support for Hitler among small businesspeople and industrial workers. (I believe that Godwin’s Law has been suspended until November 8, and perhaps—though hopefully not—beyond.)

The simple economic anxiety argument goes like this: Many Americans face real economic insecurity—stagnant real wages, higher health care costs, lower homeownership rate, “gig economy,” low workforce participation rate, etc. They think “the system”—whatever they mean by that—isn’t working for them. Hillary Clinton represents “the system” much more than Donald Trump, particularly since she’s claiming most of the legacy of Barack Obama. So they vote Trump. And to repeat: The reason white people support Trump at much higher rates than black people, even though white people are richer than black people, is that Trump is a racist. Is that so hard to understand?

A second column is about a "massive new study" that supposedly "debunks" the economic anxiety argument for Trump's support. As Kwak points out, the study itself is more circumspect than the article portrays it, to wit per Kwak's post:

Higher household income predicts a greater likelihood of Trump support overall and among whites, though not among white non-Hispanic Republicans. In other words, compared to all non-supporters or even other whites, Trump supporters earn more than non-supporters, conditional on these factors, but this is partly because Republicans, in general, earn higher incomes, and the difference is no longer significant when restricted to this group. …

On the other hand, workers in blue collar occupations (defined as production, construction, installation, maintenance, and repair, or transportation) are far more likely to support Trump, as are those with less education. … Since blue collar and less educated workers have faced greater economic distress in recent years, this provides some evidence that economic hardship and lower-socio- economic status boost Trump’s popularity.

Kwak then runs through the statistical problems with the study (starting with the fact that it is a probit regression wherein there are only two variables and the stats are then forced into one or the other variable, eliminating statistical overlap somewhat by fiat.

I won't quote his lengthy take on the statistical analysis -- suffice it to say I had to conjure up some dim remembrances of a statistics course I took back in college some 40 years ago -- but he summarizes it thusly:

The lesson is very simple, and it’s one that everyone knows before becoming a poll-reading pundit: People make decisions for different reasons. Something can be an important factor—here, it gives Trump a 20-point advantage among half the population—but get outweighed by some other important factor. Or, to put it in sophisticated language, you can’t use income as an instrument for economic anxiety, because income affects Trump support through other channels (in this example, because some rich people realize that Trump’s tax cuts will be good for them). This is really just the same mistake that Matt Yglesias made yesterday with race and age.

So there you have it. The economic anxiety argument still has legs and still fits best the underlying reason disparate groups of white folk support the Donald, and the racism and misogyny and xenophobia are expressions of that by way of scapegoating, and really as a means to continue to support the corrupt system Trump actually represents. I mean, it's easier to think the system could work for you if it weren't for those dirty Mexicans, those shiftless Negroes, and those uppity womenfolk, than to think about actually challenging and changing the workings and justifications for the system itself.