Who are the Trumpsters?

Who are the Trumpsters?

by digby

Ron Brownstein has an interesting analysis of Trump’s appeal today in the National Journal:

But two oth­er dis­tinc­tions emerged more clearly from the Quin­nipi­ac and Mar­ist sur­veys that could loom lar­ger as the race de­vel­ops. Trump drew some­what more sup­port from men than wo­men in the Quin­nipi­ac and Mar­ist sur­veys. And he con­sist­ently ran more strongly among Re­pub­lic­ans who did not hold at least a four-year col­lege de­gree than those who did. Those blue-col­lar Re­pub­lic­ans are grow­ing in in­flu­ence in the GOP nom­in­at­ing pro­cess, as a tor­rent of White work­ing-class voters have re­aligned from the Demo­crat­ic to Re­pub­lic­an Party over the past gen­er­a­tion.

The class and gender dy­nam­ics play­ing out in the GOP field com­pound each oth­er, as fig­ures provided to Next Amer­ica by Quin­nipi­ac and Mar­ist make clear. The two polling or­gan­iz­a­tions ana­lyzed the res­ults among White Re­pub­lic­an voters (who com­prise nearly all of the GOP elect­or­ate in Iowa and New Hamp­shire, and about 90 per­cent na­tion­ally) based on gender and edu­ca­tion, and found that Trump’s sup­port gen­er­ally fol­lowed con­sist­ent pat­terns.

In each of the three sur­veys, Trump runs best among White men without a col­lege de­gree, the blue-col­lar core of the mod­ern Re­pub­lic­an co­ali­tion. These work­ing-class White men give Trump 38 per­cent of their sup­port both na­tion­ally and in New Hamp­shire, and 37 per­cent in Iowa. Those are stun­ning num­bers in a field with 16 can­did­ates di­vid­ing the vote. No one comes close to Trump among these men in any of the three polls. In the na­tion­al sur­vey, sur­geon Ben Car­son ranks second with these men at just 11 per­cent. No oth­er can­did­ate at­tracts more than 17 per­cent of these men in Iowa or 13 per­cent in New Hamp­shire.

Trump’s show­ing among White wo­men without a col­lege edu­ca­tion was also strong, though not quite as dom­in­ant: He drew 32 per­cent of them in the na­tion­al poll, 30 per­cent in Iowa, and 27 per­cent in New Hamp­shire. Trump led among them in all three sur­veys, though Car­son (at 24 per­cent in Iowa and 19 per­cent in New Hamp­shire) showed com­pet­it­ively with the so-called “wait­ress moms” as well.

He doesn’t do nearly as well with the white college educated Republicans, especially college educated women. (People of other races pretty well hate him for obvious reasons.) But according to Brownstein, he’s starting to gain support among the college educated too. Still, Trump is at this point mostly a class phenomenon.

This should be interesting:

In the 2012 GOP primar­ies, voters without a col­lege de­gree cast a ma­jor­ity of the vote in 13 of the 20 states where exit polls were con­duc­ted, and at least 45 per­cent in four oth­ers. Those voters also gen­er­ally dis­play much more re­ceptiv­ity than col­lege-edu­cated Re­pub­lic­ans to the sharp anti-im­mig­ra­tion mes­sage Trump is de­liv­er­ing.

In the past two GOP pres­id­en­tial races, can­did­ates lead­ing the na­tion­al polls in the fall be­fore the first votes were cast ul­ti­mately faded without cap­tur­ing a single state. But Trump’s re­si­li­ence through re­peated con­tro­ver­sies over the past sev­er­al months have sug­ges­ted that his rivals can­not count on sup­port for him simply evap­or­at­ing: They will need to find a way to ec­lipse him.
Even­tu­ally, the oth­er can­did­ates who had been count­ing on mo­bil­iz­ing the GOP’s “pop­u­list” voters—led by Wis­con­sin Gov. Scott Walk­er and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas—will need to find a way to dent Trump’s strong early stand­ing with these volat­ile, deeply dis­af­fected, blue-col­lar Re­pub­lic­ans. Mean­while, the Re­pub­lic­ans aim­ing more at the party’s more up­scale “ma­na­geri­al” wing—a list headed by Kasich and former Flor­ida Gov. Jeb Bush—will need to con­sol­id­ate the col­lege-edu­cated Re­pub­lic­ans who are already prov­ing the least sus­cept­ible to the Trump wave.

And please don’t tell me that this is the Democrats’ failure to appeal to blue collar workers. It might be, but that ship sailed over a generation ago. These blue collar white folks are now dyed in the wool Republicans and have been Republicans since Nixon decided to make the GOP into the white person’s party and Ronald Reagan consolidated it. What’s interesting is that the coalition those leaders formed is starting to fracture as the working class whites are finally getting fed up with the elites promising them the moon and failing to deliver.

Unfortunately, the moon they want delivered is a world in which a man on a white horse rounds up and deports “bad people” they don’t like.

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