Trump Loses Ground with White Voters

In 2016 Donald Trump's main appeal to white voters - save the 1% who care more about their money than anything else - was his open racism and "make America great again" slogan that most read as "make America white again."  Four years later, 200,000 American dead due to Trump catastrophic handling of the pandemic and the economy still in tatters for many, especially non-college educated whites, Trump's explicit racism doesn't seem to gain him traction as it once did.  Elderly white voters now seem far more worried of dying of Covid-19 than non-whites beginning to trickle into their neighborhoods. Add to this the reality that Joe Biden is no where near as divisive a candidate as Hillary Clinton, and the end product appears to be a shift of white voters away from Trump.  Yes, he will still win the white vote, but will it be by a large enough margin to insure reelection.  As a piece in Politico notes, there are troubling signs for Trump (welcomed signs for the rest of us) in some critical states.  Here are article highlights:

Donald Trump is making modest inroads with Latinos. Polls suggest he’s pulling slightly more Black support than in 2016.

But Trump is tilting at the margins with those groups. His bigger problem is the demographic that sent him to the White House — white voters, whose embrace of Trump appears to be slipping in critical, predominantly white swing states.

In Minnesota, where the contest between Trump and Joe Biden had seemed to tighten in recent weeks — and where both candidates stumped on Friday — a CBS News/YouGov survey last week had Trump running 2 percentage points behind Biden with white voters, after carrying them by 7 points in 2016. Even among white voters without college degrees — Trump’s base — the president was far short of the margin he put up against Hillary Clinton there.

It’s the same story in Wisconsin, where Trump won non-college educated white women by 16 percentage points four years ago but is now losing them by 9 percentage points, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll. In Pennsylvania, Biden has now pulled even with Trump among white voters, according to an NBC News/Marist Poll.

It’s possible that the focus on Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s replacement will help Trump, reminding voters who have drifted away from him what they cared about in 2016. Four years ago, one in five voters — many of them white, social conservatives — said Supreme Court appointments were the most important factor in their vote.

But Trump is working from a disadvantage this year. There are relatively few undecided voters left to persuade. Democrats are also highly energized about the Supreme Court. And Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the court one month before the midterm elections two year ago did nothing to stop Democrats from steamrolling Trump and the GOP.

The erosion of Trump’s white support — and its significance to the November outcome — was never more obvious than in Trump’s messaging in recent days. Last week, he called for the creation of a commission to promote “patriotic education” while dismissing “critical race theory” and the 1619 project of The New York Times Magazine. At a rally in Mosinee, Wis., he lit into Kamala Harris — the first major party woman of color vice presidential nominee — lamenting the possibility of her becoming president “through the back door.”

[B]efore an overwhelmingly white crowd in Bemidji, Minn., Trump mocked Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) — the first Somali-American in Congress and a former refugee — and said Biden would “turn Minnesota into a refugee camp.”

He praised Minnesotans for their “good genes.”

But Trump’s rhetoric does not appear to be resonating with white America to the degree that he did in 2016. That year, whites cast nearly three-quarters of the vote nationally, and Trump won those voters by about 15 percentage points, according to Pew. Four years later, Biden has torn into that advantage, though to what degree is uncertain. The latest Morning Consult poll showed Trump now beating Biden among white likely voters nationally by just 5 percentage points. . . . a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll on Friday showed Biden and Trump essentially tied with white voters.

“Suburban whites are pretty much gone” for Trump, said Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. And Biden is far less objectionable to many working class whites than Clinton, a more polarizing nominee whose favorability ratings were lower than Biden’s.

Trump is doing better with whites in some states than others. In North Carolina, he is drawing non-college educated white voters at about the same levels he was in 2016. But in other states, including some with sizable populations of people of color, he is underperforming with whites. In Florida, Trump is running ahead of Biden with white voters 56 percent to 39 percent, according to a Monmouth University poll. But that is far short of the 32 percentage point margin he posted in 2016.

But white voters have not proved immune to the damage inflicted on Trump by the coronavirus and its resulting economic wreckage, which have been a drag on Trump’s reelection campaign since spring. In particular, the pandemic appears to have hurt Trump with seniors, including older white voters concerned about both their retirement accounts and their health.

“It’s these older white voters that I think are the ones that are moving” away from Trump, said Jeff Link, a veteran Iowa-based Democratic strategist who has studied voters who turned from Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. “The older people are like, ‘What the f--- is this guy doing?'”

And the issue that motivated many white voters in 2016 — immigration, amplified by Trump’s promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border — has all but fallen out of view. During his successful presidential campaign, 13 percent of voters ranked immigration as the most important issue facing the country. Last month, immigration barely registered at 2 percent in Gallup’s survey of the most important problems facing the country.

Not only do public safety-based appeals appear to be faltering for Trump, white voters “still really care about pocketbook issues, and that is the underlying issue that drives their vote,” said Zak Williams, a Democratic mail strategist based in Duluth, Minn., near where Biden campaigned Friday.

“College-educated white voters were the first group that moved away from him,” Williams said, and now Trump is “starting to drive away non-college educated white voters,” too.

At the center of Trump’s re-election math has always been the expectation that he could turn out more white, non-college educated voters in 2020 than he did in 2016, squeezing more juice from a diminishing base.

Let's hope the exodus from Trump continues.