Somebody’s dreaming
by digby
Ok, maybe Trump’s successful at finding some of those “missing white voters” who allegedly sat out the 2008 and 2012 elections because the GOP was just so icky. But Rush is having hallucinations if he actually thinks this is true:
RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): Donald Trump has actually put together the exact kind of coalition the Republican Party has been telling us that it needs in order to win. That it will not win if it doesn’t succeed in branching out and expanding the party. And the expansion includes people that were normally qualified as Reagan Democrats, Hispanics, African Americans, women. Trump is doing it, and there is all mounds of evidence for it.
[…]
Now, Trump is specifically making a play for this group. And in this group of people is white middle class voters who the Democrat Party has written off. And Dan Balz, I think it was Dan Balz, a former Washington Post columnist, wrote in November of 2000 — I think it was 2011, yeah, yeah, 2011, that the Democrats planned to write off white working class votes. And if you look at Obama’s economic policy, look at Obama’s Obamacare policy, he is. White working class voters are persona non-grata.
And Trump is getting them. He is getting them in droves. And the Republican Party doesn’t want them. It’s the most amazing thing. Trump is actually putting together what the Republican Party has told us is the coalition they cannot win without.
And now apparently they really don’t want to expand the party to include white middle class Democrats, Hispanics, and others from the Democrat Party if Trump is responsible for bringing them. Look at it this way, Trump has assembled a package the GOP says it desperately needs and wants in order to win in the future. But now they’re not interested because they don’t like the delivery company.
There is no mountain of evidence that Trump is getting Hispanics, African Americans, middle class Democrats or women. In fact, in the case of Hispanics, he’s driving them to register to vote against him. African Americans aren’t going to vote for him, they know the score, and middle class white Democrats show no signs that they are leaving the party. Married white women always tend to vote Republican.
He’s just making stuff up. If Trump is bringing in new voters they are previously non-voting white working class types. That’s not to say that it’s insignificant for the Republicans if that’s the case, but it’s not a “broad coalition.”
*And by the way, one of the greatest acts of malfeasance on the part of the media this cycle is the absurd notion that Trump is bringing in Latinos based upon some dramatic win with them in the Nevada caucus. Despite the numerous headlines that day saying Trump scored big with something close to 50% of that population, this was based upon an entrance poll that may have only sampled around 130 actual humans who called themselves Latino:
We are only talking about the very small percent of Nevada Latinos who are Republican today. An overwhelming majority of Nevada Latinos are Democrats. In a recent poll asking about party identification, 55% of Latinos said they were Democrats, 29% said Independents and just 16% said they were Republicans. Assuming the entrance poll is correct (a very big assumption) and Trump won 44% of Latino Republicans, that means he was supported by about 7% of Latinos in Nevada (44% of 16 = 7.04). What that mean is that most likely, 93% of Latinos in Nevada did not vote for Trump.
The entrance poll has a very, very small sample size of Latino Republicans, perhaps only 130, which means that even if everything else is perfect in its methodology, it carries a +/- 8.5% points on the Latino sample. Further, the Nevada entrance polls are not designed to get accurate subgroup vote share estimates, but rather report on statewide numbers, so their design is not trying to capture a representative sample of Latino Republicans, which adds some amount of unknown bias, beyond the +/- 8.5%
More importantly:
In a poll of Latino voters in general election battleground states (which included Nevada), impreMedia and Latino Decisions found that 80% of Latino voters said Trump’s statements about Mexicans and immigrants gave them a less favorable opinion of the GOP overall. This has been corroborated by Gallup’s monthly tracker and NBC polling, and reported by CNN in their headline “Latinos see Donald Trump as hurting GOP brand“and most recently by Political Science professor Lynn Vavreck writing for the New York Times Upshot who called him “damager-in-chief to the party reputation” among Latinos.