The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016 came as a shock to most of the country. Many social scientists were caught off-guard, as usually reliable polls had predicted a comfortable victory for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. In the wake of such an unexpected event, the postmortems began immediately: How could so many careful analysts have been so wrong? Quickly, the answer settled on the shift of a relatively small but significant group of working-class whites in Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania from Democratic voters in 2012 to Republicans in 2016.

Media pundits seized on the power of Trump’s populist appeal, while sociologists and political scientists focused their attention on surveys of economic anxieties and attitudes toward race and immigration, attempting to adjudicate between the relative importance of each. In Rich Voter, Poor Voter, Red Voter, Blue Voter, Charles Prysby takes us beyond these fairly narrow attempts to explain Trump’s victory, instead situating the rather remarkable events of 2016 in a much broader pattern of class-based voting by whites in America, a trend that has been growing stronger in recent years. Prysby’s book should be required reading for those looking for an introduction to class and political behavior among whites, because it clearly and methodically reviews its history, its relationship to other important cleavages in voting behavior, and its implications for future political alignments.

Although Prysby’s argument about the importance of class to voting behavior among white Americans is motivated by the surprise Republican victory in 2016, his book is by no means a simple explanation of Trump’s victory. Rich Voter, Poor Voter, Red Voter, Blue Voter traces the importance of class (measured at various points in time by occupation, education, or income) to white American voting patterns, especially presidential voting and party affiliation. The extraordinary dominance of the Democratic Party in American politics throughout the 1930s and 1940s—and, to a lesser extent, the 1950s—is owed in part to the loyalty of white working-class ethnics. Union membership strongly tied many blue-collar whites to the Democratic Party, whereas higher-income, professional whites showed allegiance to the Republican Party. These affinities began to break down somewhat in the elections of 1968 and 1972, although Prysby notes that these were chimeric reflections of the influence of the Vietnam War and the presence of George Wallace on the ballot, despite analysts’ premature announcements of the end of class in politics (a death knell that has been frequently sounded since). The results of the 1976 election were more similar to those of 1964 than to 1972 in terms of class splits among whites.

As Prysby notes, he is not the first to observe that there have been shifts in white working-class support for the Democratic Party over the last 80 years. However, he does present data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) for each presidential election broken down by different measures of social class, which results in an exceptionally clear exposition of the trend that highlights the special effect of education in the 2016 election. Two real strengths of this book are its detailed review of different measures of class and its case for a dichotomous measure of income as the optimal way to operationalize class when measuring voting behavior.

The last half-century has witnessed a shift away from occupation as the predominant way of measuring class and its replacement with education. When the United States was an industrial economy and women were less central to the labor force, the blue collar–white collar distinction was meaningful in a way that it is no longer. Prysby critiques the current utility of occupation as a measure of class given its lack of parsimony, consisting as it does of numerous classifications that defy easy categorization. Subjective social class seems to be the most powerful measure on its surface, as affiliation with the working class should be a necessary and sufficient test of class membership. However, it proves to be the messiest, being heavily influenced by reference group, union membership, education, and so on, such that it can be difficult to know just what the variable is actually capturing. Prysby sets his most critical eye on the one measure of class that has dominated recent studies of white working-class politics: education. Given its ease of measurement and its robust relationship to party membership, voting, and a host of racial, immigrant, cultural, and economic attitudes, education has dominated recent discussions of class. Prysby convincingly argues that this is a mistake—not that education should not be considered one component of social standing, but that it is not the most reliable indicator of an individual’s political interests or motivations. He reviews the familiar examples of those who have made great fortunes without college degrees, such as Bill Gates, but much more convincingly points out that there are still large shares of the electorate who have had lucrative careers that did not require college degrees, even though they most likely would require degrees today. Increasing credentialism has influenced our notion of what it means to be “uneducated.” The education measure is also silent on the thorny question of small business owners: Are they truly members of the working class?

So, what is an analyst of class divisions in voting to do? Prysby’s answer is to focus on income differences, a measure that is perhaps the least often used in isolation. He argues that income is not only correlated with education and occupation but it is also directly connected to beliefs about economic policies in ways that other class measures are not; hence, it is a better operationalization of class for the purpose of analyzing voting behavior.

Armed with data on “high-income” versus “low-income” white American attitudes and voting data, Prysby tracks the extent to which white working class versus middle class racial attitudes and attitudes toward immigration have changed over time. He finds that racial attitudes do not explain much in the way of class-based voting among whites, but attitudes toward immigration do. The gap between working-class and middle-class whites’ attitudes toward immigration, with working-class whites favoring greater restrictions, has remained roughly the same since 2000. However, its impact on the vote has greatly increased, explaining part of the white working-class Republican shift. So, too, have cultural issues such as attitudes toward abortion and LGBTQ rights, on which the white working class has retained consistently more conservative positions for decades.

The one dimension that one might expect social class to have the strongest relationship with—economic issues—witnessed almost no differences in voting behavior between the white working class and the white middle class in 2016. The white working class has been developing more conservative positions on economic issues such as labor unions and social welfare spending at the same time that the white middle class has been becoming more liberal. Along with this important corrective to the narrative about class-based voting, Prysby also finds that trust in politicians had little influence on class-based voting in the last four elections, calling into question the argument that white working-class voters were rejecting political elites by voting against Clinton or Kerry.

In sum, Prysby’s clear and careful exposition of the relationship between class and white voting behavior is an excellent addition to analyses of the 2016 election, as well as to the broader literature on class and American politics.