Trump’s Doing Worse Than Romney Did Among White Voters

[Doctor Jack]

Donald Trump’s strategy in this campaign has been fairly clear from the beginning: Drive up Republican support among white voters in order to compensate for the GOP’s shrinking share among the growing nonwhite portion of the electorate. And Trump has succeeded in overperforming among a certain slice of white voters, those without a college degree. But overall, the strategy isn’t working. Trump has a smaller lead among white voters than Mitt Romney did in 2012, and Trump’s margin seems to be falling from where it was when the general election began.

Four years ago, Romney beat President Obama among white voters by 17 percentage points, according to pre-election polls. That was the largest winning margin among white voters for any losing presidential candidate since at least 1948. Of course, even if Trump did just as well as Romney did, it would help him less, given that the 2016 electorate will probably be more diverse that 2012’s. And to win — even if the electorate remained as white as it was four years ago — Trump would need a margin of 22 percentage points or more among white voters.

But Trump isn’t even doing as well as Romney. Trump is winning white voters by just 13 percentage points, according to an average of the last five live-interviewer national surveys.1 He doesn’t reach the magic 22 percentage point margin in a single one of these polls.


Trump’s less-than-overwhelming margins among white voters in the polls listed above are a big reason why all five surveys showed him trailing Hillary Clinton overall. In fact, Trump would be losing by a larger margin, but third-party candidates are getting support from younger and minority voters, so that Clinton is slightly underperforming Obama among these groups. But the magnitude of Clinton’s struggles with young and nonwhite voters isn’t anywhere big enough to cancel out Trump’s relatively poor showing among white voters.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trumps-doing-worse-than-romney-did-among-white-voters/

[underpants]

1. Solution

[Doctor Jack]

3. Yup. All they need is to set back the clock 3 decades on Americas demographics

It seems like they would rather try to build a time machine than just not be racist pricks.

[get the red out]

2. Hard to hide the crazy from all white voters

At least I hope! I'm white and I am obviously a democrat, but Trump is just whacko!

[writes3000]

4. That's no surprise given Romney ran against a black guy.

Clinton should be doing better with women than Obama did.

I'm curious to see if Clinton or Obama does better with men. I have a feeling Obama does better with men.

If Clinton can come close to Obama'-numbers with blacks or millennials, I think she wins guaranteed.

[Gothmog]

5. The GOP cannot win as the party of old white people

The shift in demographics is going to kill the GOP unless it broadens its base

[Doctor Jack]

6. The half hearted attempt by Jeb (!) went over like a lead balloon

The base is batshit. It they were wise they would write off the crazy old white people and plan for the future. But that is asking a lot of a party that likes to live 50 years in the past.