The 2020 campaign will be more racially divisive than 2016 was

DONALD TRUMP’S bigotry is such an established part of American public discourse that, in retrospect, one of the most febrile debates of 2016 looks naive. Back and forth it went, in the months before the election, as the Republican candidate issued a slur against a Mexican-American judge and for a while refused to disavow the endorsement of a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard. Was Mr Trump mainly appealing to his supporters’ economic concerns—in spite of his chauvinism? Or was his race-baiting really the main draw?

The answer was in long before the president sent an especially offensive tweet this week, inviting four unnamed, but by inference non-white, Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to where they came from. It was settled before he refused to condemn the white supremacists of Charlottesville two years ago. The data from his 2016 election have been scrutinised, and the resulting analyses, detailed in books and papers, are in agreement. Political scientists find no clear economic rationale for Mr Trump’s victory.