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Trump’s beer track advantage over

Ron DeSantis
The divide quickly defining the GOP primary.

Former President Donald Trump has a 17-point lead among Republicans without a college degree (up from
a 10-point lead in February). Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images
|

By Steven Shepard
03/25/2023 07:00 AM EDT

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pre-campaign campaign for president has hit the
skids — particularly among key blocs of voters he’ll need to dethrone former
President Donald Trump next year.

Polls show Trump dominating his likely primary competitor among GOP voters
in the so-called “beer track” — a shorthand for the cultural and socioeconomic
characteristics of the bloc of voters with lower incomes and levels of
educational attainment. While DeSantis is still the preferred candidate of high-
ncome voters and those with college degrees, he is showing signs of bleeding
there, too. In recent weeks, Trump’s numbers have been rising among all
Republicans, including with GOP voters most skeptical of his candidacy in the
so-called “wine track.”

Take, for example, this week’s Quinnipiac University poll which shows Trump
leading DeSantis, 46 percent to 32 percent, with the other candidates each
registering 5 percent or less. Trump had just a 6-point lead in Quinnipiac’s poll
last month.

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Trump has a 17-point lead among Republicans without a college degree (up
from a 10-point lead in February). And while DeSantis still leads among voters
with a four-year degree, 40 percent to 28 percent, Trump has significantly cut
into what was a 29-point deficit with those voters in the past month.

Even were he not able to make inroads on DeSantis’ turf, Trump has an
inherent advantage. A decades-long realignment has pushed college-educated
voters toward Democrats — an already-existing trend that Trump accelerated
— making the GOP’s “beer track” the larger cohort among Republican primary
voters. Such divides defined the 2016 GOP presidential primary, propelling
Trump to a once-unlikely nomination and, ultimately, the presidency.

It’s obviously still early in the 2024 contest: DeSantis isn’t even a declared
candidate yet, and most of the new polls were conducted prior to the news that
Trump may soon face criminal charges in New York related to an alleged hush-
oney payment he made during his 2016 campaign to hide an extramarital
affair. Other potential legal troubles loom on the horizon.

Moreover, though the overall trends have been good for Trump, there’s little
consensus in the national polling, with some surveys showing him and
DeSantis essentially neck-and-neck, while others suggest the former president
has a firm grasp on his third straight GOP nomination.

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But even if the campaign hasn’t officially started, the recent polling trends do
provide positive data for Trump and troubling numbers for DeSantis.
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Of the three major media and academic surveys released in the past two weeks
— from CNN Monmouth University and Quinnipiac University — two of them
,

have trend data showing a Trump bump over the past month.

In addition to the Quinnipiac survey, the Monmouth poll released this week
showed Trump leading the Florida governor by 1 point, erasing a 13-point,
head-to-head disadvantage with DeSantis compared to the school’s February
poll. (Similarly, among the full field of candidates, Trump led DeSantis by 14 Trump screams into void as
Manhattan DA probe goes quiet
points in the new poll, compared to a tie last month.)
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Some of the most dramatic swings toward Trump came among the groups Republicans closing in on 2024
recruit
where DeSantis had his biggest advantages. In the February Monmouth poll,
DeSantis’ lead over Trump in the two-way matchup was 28 points among The Surreal Post-Trump Embrace
of Mark Milley
voters who make $50,000 a year or more. But he only leads Trump now by 2
points in this group, a 26-point swing. (Trump has a double-digit lead over Graham admonished by Senate
Republican voters making less than $50,000 a year.) Ethics

House Republicans pass broad

The Monmouth poll, however, still shows DeSantis with a large lead among education measure on ‘parents
voters with college degrees, 62 percent to 30 percent — similar to his advantage rights’
among this group last month.

A CNN poll out last week was better for DeSantis, showing the two men neck-
nd-neck. DeSantis led Trump by 18 points among white voters with college
degrees, though other candidates received significant support among this bloc,
including former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (14 percent) and former Vice
President Mike Pence (8 percent).

There’s also a large sample, rolling tracking poll from the online firm Morning
Consult , which shows Trump with a much larger — and growing — lead over
DeSantis, underscoring some of the variance among the public survey data, but
still with the trend moving in Trump’s direction.

While the same class divide among Republicans exists as in 2016, polls suggest
it’s even bigger now. In the 28 states where the TV networks commissioned
entrance or exit polls in the 2016 caucuses and primaries, Trump was backed
by 47 percent of voters without college degrees, compared to 35 percent of
those with college degrees.

What might be even better news from Trump is that the beer track vote is
growing as a share of the GOP electorate. While college graduates made up a
majority of Republican caucus-goers and primary voters in recent cycles, larger
political realignments will likely mean that in most states, GOP voters without
college degrees will outnumber those who have graduated from college next
year.

Nerdcast

Nerdcast 2016: Trump’s nontraditional transition

There are some other key differences between 2016 and 2024. Trump was the
outsider candidate in his first campaign, but he now runs stronger among
voters who most closely identify with the Republican Party. In the Monmouth
poll, he leads DeSantis by 18 points among those who describe themselves as
“strong Republicans,” while he trails among independents who lean toward the
GOP.

Similarly, Trump’s support is strongest now among the most conservative

voters. In the Quinnipiac poll, he leads DeSantis among “very conservative”
voters by 21 points, and in the Monmouth poll, it’s a 25-point advantage when
surveyed as a head-to-head contest.

In 2016, by contrast, Trump actually lost “very conservative” voters in the

aggregated entrance and exit polls to the runner-up, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas),
41 percent to 37 percent.

Another 2016 split that isn’t apparent this time — at least not yet — is along
gender lines. Trump beat Cruz among men by 19 points in 2016, according to
the entrance and exit polls, compared to a 10-point Trump advantage among
women.

But in the most recent 2024 polls, Trump runs as well among women, if not
better. In each of the three recent polls — those from CNN, Monmouth and
Quinnipiac — Trump has a larger lead among women than among men, though
the differences are not always statistically significant. Haley, the only woman to
declare her candidacy, also runs stronger with female voters in primary polling.

For now, however, the greatest divide with potential to define the 2024
Republican primary is class. Don’t expect the most educated Republicans to fall
in love with Trump, or the “beer track” to abandon him en masse. But any
marked shifts among these groups in the coming months could make the
difference.

Filed under: Republican Primaries , Ron DeSantis , Donald Trump , 2024 Elections

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