Trump did much better than expected among minorities (edit: based on questionable exit polls)

[Gori the Grey]

My response is to some elements of the OP, rather than to the discussion of Hispanic voting patterns that has ensued:

One of the most interesting results of the night is that Trump's voter base is not actually all-white; it's still pretty white, being the GOP and all, but it appears to be less white than Mitt Romney's voters four years ago. The margin was 65-29 for Clinton among Latinos, compared to Obama's 71-27 margin among Hispanic voters four years ago. The margins would then be 36 points now versus 44 points then, for a swing of 8 percentage points to Trump. The black vote also appears to have reverted to its pre-Obama 80-point margin rather than the 2012 87-point margin.

It would appear that mainstream liberals greatly overestimated the role of racial demography in this election

Is it possible that people really don't like being chopped up and treated as racial/religious/gender/etc. demographics?

First, I would note that your data could also be used to support the idea that racial identification does matter in voting preference: minority voters voted for fellow-minority Obama in higher numbers than they did for Hillary.

Second, I would answer your final question with a qualified affirmative. I wouldn't phrase it just as you have done, but there was a dimension of Clinton's rhetoric that I think only went half way as far as it needed to go. She kept faulting Trump for his treatment of--polysyndetic list of discrete demographic groups to follow: Hispanics and Muslims and the handicapped and women. By contrast, her campaign slogan asserted that we were "Stronger Together." But she never made that "strength" a concrete policy vision. It's fine to invoke that admirable set of values in our society by which aspire to appreciate rather than denigrate people from different subject positions (as preferable to Trump's corrosive hating). But that can't be where you stop. How, precisely, are we to be "stronger together" going forward?

The night of the election, one of the commentators, I think Chris Matthews, pointed this out: that she never made an appeal to the general electorate, but (I would add) only to the population imagined as a chopped up set of various demographics. That's fine, that's the Democratic coalition. But beyond the existence and continuing mutual respect among the constituents of that coalition (again, no insignificant thing in itself), why are Americans supposed to vote for you, Hillary? An as-it-turns-out catastrophic lacuna in the appeal she tried to make.

So, to answer your question more directly, I don't think people resent being chopped up and treated as various demographics: our society does that all the time. But I don't think it's a presidential appeal to just leave it at that.

 

[Bootstoots]

Okay, I'm now pretty convinced the exit polls the OP is based on are dubious. Edited OP and title to reflect this, and revised my opinion of polling down even further.

Gori's post is excellent. I have only one quibble:

First, I would note that your data could also be used to support the idea that racial identification does matter in voting preference: minority voters voted for fellow-minority Obama in higher numbers than they did for Hillary.

I agree, and I hope people aren't misinterpreting my OP as a claim that race doesn't matter in voting preference. Of course it does: the GOP is still overwhelmingly white. I'm looking at the difference with expectations and the change vs. Romney, but I'm not disputing that race matters bigly.