Trump Election Field Day for Social Scientists

This election has turned out to be a field day for social scientists. Examples:

First, I'm currently reading "Strangers in Their Own Land" by Arlie Hochschild, about how working class whites are supporting Republican candidates who really do very little to help them out, at least in the terms that liberals mostly think in.

Then, this morning on NPR, social scientist Shannon Monnat, an assistant professor of rural sociology and demography at Penn State University, has been studying drug and alcohol mortality rates: "Well, so this was part of a larger project where I've been trying to understand the common characteristics of places with high rates of mortality from drugs, alcohol and suicide - these kinds of deaths of despair....So I started looking at the data, especially within regions of the country where the opiate epidemic has received a lot of attention. And what I found was that Trump outperformed the previous Republican candidate Mitt Romney the most in counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates."

It seems that no detail is going unexamined.