There Are More White Voters Than People Think. That's Good News for Trump. - The New Yo... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...thats-good-news-for-trump.html
white voters demographics election 2016 2012 2008 politics
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The larger number of white working-class voters implies that Democrats are far more dependent on winning white working-class voters, and therefore more vulnerable to a populist candidate like Mr. Trump.
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Over all, 34 percent of Mr. Obama’s supporters were white voters without a college degree, compared with 25 percent in the exit polls, according to an Upshot statistical model that integrated census data
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The best case for Mr. Trump is that white Northerners reluctantly backed Mr. Obama because Mr. Romney was successfully caricatured as a rapacious plutocrat.
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The data implies that demographic shifts played a somewhat smaller role in Mr. Obama’s re-election than the postelection narrative suggested. Even if the electorate were as old and as white as it was in 2004, Mr. Obama would have won, because of the gains he made among white voters in states like New Mexico, Colorado and Iowa.
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All of this is good news for a Republican who intends to win with greater strength among white working-class voters, like Mr. Trump.
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the Upshot analysis shows that all of Mr. Obama’s weaknesses were in the South — defined as the former Confederacy plus Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky and West Virginia — where he won just 26 percent.
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Yet it’s hard to argue that the attacks on Bain Capital were responsible for Mr. Obama’s gains among young and college-educated white voters. These voters moved decisively in Mr. Obama’s direction, perhaps in part because of cultural issues. If that’s right, Mr. Trump will be hard pressed to reverse Mr. Obama’s gains — and there’s plenty of evidence he could slip further.
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According to data from L2, a nonpartisan voter file vendor, the missing white voters were far more likely to be registered Democrats, or to have participated in Democratic primaries, than the white voters who actually did turn out.
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Even if the missing white voters were disproportionately Republican, a return to previous turnout levels wouldn’t have been anywhere near enough to get Mr. Romney over the top. There were far fewer missing white voters in the battleground states than there were nationally. There weren’t close to enough of them to flip the outcome in key states.
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The real pool of missing white voters are those who haven’t participated in any recent election, or aren’t even registered to vote. There are millions of these missing white voters — but they will be much harder to mobilize. Many are young, and might not be especially favorable to Mr. Trump. The older ones are true bystanders in American politics.
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If Mr. Trump lost five points among well-educated white voters and Hispanics, which is how he’s doing in current polls, his target for white working-class voters would quickly skyrocket. In a battleground state like Colorado, for example, he would need to gain 15 percentage points more of the white working class