If you want to understand how badly Democrats lost the white working class in the 2016 election, your local fire station is not a bad place to start.
Nearly 85 percent of professional firefighters are white, and more than 95 percent are men, making them look a lot like the other blue-collar voters who surged to Donald Trump this year. But firefighters are also heavily unionized, tend to live in cities or suburbs (rural areas often have volunteer fire companies) and are government employees — all factors generally associated with the Democratic Party.
And all of those characteristics, along with the fact that firefighters are roughly evenly distributed across the country, make the group a microcosm of the larger breakup between working-class whites and the Democratic Party this year.