Poverty and socio-economic inequality elected Donald Trump. There is a strange self-defeating feature of extreme poverty that can become a vicious cycle. When you cross a certain point, the hope of resolving your problems constructively by improving habits, engaging your community, investing in yourself - instead you take a shortcut alternative by modifying your perception of how the world works. So long as you don't have much evidence to contradict this model, its a psychologically stable strategy. Life satisfaction and health gradually drops over time and for satisfaction it reaches a minimum (unless they are upper class) just before retirement. The ability to insulate oneself from contradicting information to one's world view is particularly easy the further you get from the city. Buying into an alternative reality, blaming others, these are all coping mechanisms for people who are on the margins of society and have given up on changing that fact but instead spend their remaining efforts to come up with a good story they can deal with. The vote patterns in 2016 point to rural-urban divide, markers for extreme poverty and to a lesser extent race. I'd guess age is also important but probably not as much as these other factors. What to do about it? Re-investing in human capital and building social and economic bridges between the marginal and the strong communities. Its critical to have a prototype blueprint for how this can get started on a small scale so that there is a model that can spread without waiting for a top-down solution. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5734668/