It's A Big, Big Swing' - Trump Loses Ground With White Voters - POLITICO

9/21/2020 ‘It’s a big, big swing’: Trump loses ground with white voters - POLITICO
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2020 ELECTIONS
‘It’s a big, big swing’: Trump loses ground with white voters
The president is running well behind his 2016 pace with the demographic that sent him to the White House.
White voters have not proved immune to the damage inflicted on President Donald Trump by the
coronavirus and its resulting economic wreckage, which have been a drag on his reelection campaign since
spring. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo
By DAV I D SIDERS
09/21/2020 04:30 AM EDT
Donald Trump is making modest inroads with Latinos. Polls suggest he’s
pulling slightly more Black support than in 2016.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/21/trump-white-voters-support-418420 1/10
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.
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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.
P O L I T I C O D I S PAT C H : S E P T E M B E R 2 1
Just a handful of states could decide who becomes the

next president. POLITICO reporters from across the
country break down what it will take for Donald Trump
and Joe Biden to win over the most critical voters.
S u b s c r i b e o n A p p l e Po d c a s t s | S u b s c r i b e o n G o o g l e Po d c a s t s
In 2016, white voters cast over 80 percent of the vote in each of the three
states, according to exit polls.
“It’s a big, big swing,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College
Institute for Public Opinion. “What [Biden’s] doing among whites is more than
offsetting the slippage among non-whites … The recipe is very different this
time, right now anyway, in terms of white voters.”
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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.”
On Friday, he released a TV ad in Minnesota and Michigan lashing into Biden

for supporting increased refugee admissions, including from “the most
unstable, vulnerable, dangerous parts of the world.” Then, before 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. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Sunday put Trump up
among white voters by 9 percentage points, while a PBS
NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll on Friday showed Biden and Trump essentially
tied with white voters.
LETTER TO WASHINGTON
Trump’s Biggest Problem Isn’t Wealthy Suburbanites. It’s the
White Working Class.
BY TIM A L B E RTA
Anywhere in that range is a problem for Trump. It is a major reason why

Biden, despite underperforming with voters of color, is still running ahead
nationally.
“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
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lower than Biden’s.
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“If Trump loses Pennsylvania by four or five points,” Rendell said, “then the
suburbs and the working class whites, that accounts for the loss.”
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. In Arizona, he has seen his 14-
point edge with white voters in 2016 cut as well.
It wasn’t always clear Trump would have any problem with white voters — or
that he would be making gains with people of color. Even in the midterm
elections, when suburbanites recoiled from Trump and Democrats retook the
House, Republicans carried the white vote nationally by about 10 percentage
points.
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?”
Earlier this year, Trump appeared to have an opening to recapture white

support. Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis — and the
ensuing protests across the country — Trump pivoted to a law-and-order
campaign, with overt appeals to suburban whites. But the effort has largely
fallen flat, with numerous polls suggesting the turmoil was doing little to
improve Trump’s prospects. Advertisement
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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.
Pat McCrory, the former Republican governor of North Carolina, said he has
been “very surprised” that the Trump campaign has not leaned more heavily
into immigration, particularly around Biden’s past statements about health
care for undocumented immigrants.
But with the coronavirus and months of civil unrest on the electorate’s mind,
“the two moving factors [in the election] may be the violence and the virus: The
two V’s. Both parties are throwing ads and mail out on those two issues.”
McCrory said, “There does seem to be a little flip” between Biden and Trump,
with Biden courting working class whites and Trump “actually trying to go after
the Black vote, and the Hispanic vote.”
Appearing at a town hall last week in his childhood home of Scranton, Pa., a
city that is more than 80 percent white, Biden cited his “Scranton roots” in an
appeal to the working class, saying he was accustomed to people deriding those
“who look at us and think that we're suckers, look at us and they think that we
don't — we're not equivalent to them.”
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.
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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. Nick Trainer, the
Trump campaign's director of battleground strategy, said "the vast majority of
polls are over-sampling Democrats and are relying on an outdated sampling
formula."
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Trainer acknowledged Trump "has room to improve his numbers with certain
voters, including suburban women and voters who disliked both candidate
Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016." However, he said "sustained pre-election
attacks on issues we know these voters care about will hurt Joe Biden and
boost President Trump."
Even if the result is a margin of victory with non-college educated white voters
that is smaller than it was four years ago, Trump will almost certainly carry
that group. And if he can turn them out in greater numbers, he could shift the
electorate toward him in several predominantly white states. Republicans and
Democrats alike estimate there are hundreds of thousands of unregistered,
non-college educated whites in key swing states that Trump could still pick up.
That fight for those voters was on display in Minnesota on Friday, where
Trump and Biden appeared not in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs, but in
more culturally conservative, northern reaches of the state. Republicans there
and in some of the whitest counties in the country say they haven’t seen any
fall-off for Trump, and many of them suspect that polls are still under-
representing his support.
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Stephanie Soucek, chairwoman of the Republican Party in Wisconsin’s Door

County said she sees more Trump signs in her county than she did in 2016.
Jack Brill, acting chairman of the local Republican Party in Sarasota County,
Fla., said “the base in Sarasota County is as strong as ever.”
In Duluth, the target of much attention from the Trump campaign, city’s
former mayor, Gary Doty, acknowledged that the president may have shed
some support among some white women because of “the way he presents
himself. He’s sometimes crude and rude, and I don’t care for that style.”
However, he said, “I think there’s this silent group of people” who support
Trump and will turn out for him.
Doty said that after he endorsed Trump recently, “people that wouldn’t talk to
me about politics … after they heard I had supported the Trump ticket, would
come say, ‘Hey, I’m for him, too.'"
FILED UNDER: JOE BIDEN, JOE BIDEN 2020, ED RENDELL, MINNESOTA, PAT MCCRORY,
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It's A Big, Big Swing' - Trump Loses Ground With White Voters - POLITICO

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9/21/2020 ‘It’s a big, big swing’: Trump loses ground with white voters - POLITICO

spring. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

09/21/2020 04:30 AM EDT

Just a handful of states could decide who becomes the

On Friday, he released a TV ad in Minnesota and Michigan lashing into Biden

He praised Minnesotans for their “good genes.”

Trump’s Biggest Problem Isn’t Wealthy Suburbanites. It’s the

White Working Class.

Anywhere in that range is a problem for Trump. It is a major reason why

lower than Biden’s.

Earlier this year, Trump appeared to have an opening to recapture white

Your guide to the year-round campaign cycle.

Stephanie Soucek, chairwoman of the Republican Party in Wisconsin’s Door

the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Breaking News Alerts

Credit Card Payments

Do not sell my info

Notice to California Residents

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

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