GOP’s 2016 Problem: Clinton’s Numbers Among White Voters

Through its policies of division and bigotry the GOP has driven away would be supporters in many demographic groups leaving itself largely a party of white conservatives - may of whom are religious fanatics and/or white supremacists in all but form name.  The result is that in a national election, the GOP must capture a very high percentage of the white vote to have any chance of prevailing.  In 2016, they may face a problem: Hillary Clinton's polling numbers with white voters.  Here are excerpts from a piece in The Daily Beast:

Culture will likely shape the 2016 presidential elections, and this is bad news for the Republican Party. Recent polls show Hillary Clinton running well among white voters overall, showing real strength among white non-evangelical Protestants, and running competitively among white Catholics. Trailing only among evangelicals, Clinton is poised to move beyond the upstairs-downstairs coalition that brought Barack Obama to the White House, and that continues to characterize his policies and presidency to this day.

On multiple levels Clinton is not Obama, and GOP swipes at Clinton over her age and health appear to have gained less traction among voters than digs leveled at the President over his birth certificate and religion. Instead of faltering, Clinton is building upon her bid for the 2008 Democratic nomination, when she stitched together wins in industrial and large states by winning a majority of white voters.

Take Pennsylvania, which Clinton loyalist and talking head James Carville once described as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.” Its Democrats definitively preferred Clinton over Obama in the state’s 2008 presidential primaries. Six years ago, Clinton beat Obama by nine points, and now she leads prospective 2016 Republican contenders Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and Mike Huckabee among Pennsylvania’s white voters in general, and surprisingly among ++ white voters without college degrees. 

Clinton’s strength in Pennsylvania is not dissimilar to her recent showings elsewhere in the Rust Belt. Polls also Clinton leading all comers in Ohio and in Wisconsin, where she is ahead of native son Ryan, incumbent Governor Scott Walker, and the rest of the Republican field. For the GOP, these numbers are disconcerting as they crystalize the Republicans’ modernity gap, which puts them at a disadvantage with women and voters with graduate degrees, while at the same time being forced to woo the non-Southern white working class.So far, the Republicans appear stymied in their efforts to lay a glove on Clinton, and it’s not just attacks on her health that have gone nowhere.

But it’s the hot-button social issues that stand to give the Republicans the greatest difficulty, with women being a majority of voters, religious “nones and others” a growing proportion of the electorate, while evangelicals have become a majority of Republican presidential primary voters.

[S]cratch beneath the surface, and a clear Republican disadvantage emerges, as women are definitively pro-choice, and it is men who break pro-life. Thus, abortion is another gender gap issue, where men and the GOP come out second best.

Just look at Virginia. The seat of the Confederacy and the home of Gen. Robert E. Lee went for Barack Obama twice in a row. More than 60 percent of Virginians expressed their support for abortion being legal in all or most instances, and not surprisingly those voters went Democratic. For the Republicans that’s a headache as no Republican since 1920 has made it to the White House without winning Virginia. Ohio’s exit polls tell a similar story  . . . 

In theory, Clinton remains vulnerable because of her ties to Wall Street, and the Democrats’ war on coal. the Republicans appear ill-equipped to capitalize on either front against Clinton. Republicans are mesmerized by their own donor base, witness the GOP’s contenders fawning all over Sheldon Adelson, and New Jersey’s Chris Christie breaking bread with disgraced hedge fund guru Steven A. Cohen on Election Night 2013—even after Cohen’s company had pleaded guilty to criminal insider trading charges. 

There's more that is worth a full read.  I find it ironic that the GOP's constant pandering to its delusional base may yet come back to bite it big time in 2016.