Trump Boosted By Midwest Democratic
Party-Switchers, So Racism, Sneers NY Times
New York
real-estate developer Donald Trump has dominated the Republican nomination
campaign for months — but his strongest support doesn’t come from any of
the organized blocs in the Republican Party.
He polls well among conservative and evangelical voters,
to be sure, running competitively against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) Score 97% with these voters.
The new Civis Analytics survey shows that Trump wins 40
percent support from these party-switching voters. These once-registered
Democrats — likely because of family or local history — now make up 10
percent of Republican primary voters, but are a larger factor in the states
throughout the industrial Midwest and South.
Simple economics explain the strong support in West
Virginia for a candidate whose slogan is “Make America Great Again.”
Trump’s appeal to people facing strong economic anxiety.
The media’s political analysis on these matters is
juvenile, but it is one that has taken hold of the leadership of both political
parties. The entire leadership of the national Republican Party is obsessed
with avoiding all discussion or legal or illegal immigration for fear of
alienating potential future voters.
Actually, it is more superficial than that. The
Republican Party fears alienating the possible theoretical beliefs of
these future voters. The challenge of any political party is not to conform its
views to a laundry list of positions, but to galvanize voters around a set of
beliefs the party argues is most important in an election.
The obsessive focus by both political parties on future and
potential voters has the inevitable consequence of ignoring an
awful lot of current voters. Mitt Romney might very well have been elected
President but for the apparent disappearance of millions of white,
working-class voters.
In Ohio, the share of Hispanics voting actually fell
between 2008 and 2012 but the African-American vote grew by almost 40 percent,
while the White vote fell by 5 percent. If the White working-class share of the
vote had been the same in 2012 as it was in 2008, Romney would likely have been
elected.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2012, Democrat
strategists openly worried about the party’s terrible standing with white
working class voters. In early 2013, the Center for American Progress, a
left-wing think tank, produced an analysis highlighting the weakness of
Democrats among white working class voters. Leading progressive strategist Ruy
Teixeira worried that Democrats would face strong political head-winds unless
the party could broaden its appeal to these disaffected voters.
“As the 2012 elections demonstrated, the group that has
perhaps the greatest potential in this regard is the white working class,”
Teixeira and Andrew Levison wrote in The New Republic. “The white working class
has the potential to be a—if not the—decisive swing voter group for the
future.” With great fanfare, the CAP, and other leading
progressive groups, launched the “Bobby Kennedy Project” to improve the
Democrat’s outreach to working class voter
A contributing factor in the project’s demise was the
perceived risk of moderating current positions of the Democrat party to attract
working class voters.
“At this point, the tradeoffs they might have to make to
attract more working-class white voters may not be worth the cost in irritating
the constituencies of their current coalition,” University of Virginia
political scientist Geoff Skelley emailed to the Washington Free Beacon.
“Democrats may believe they have the economic arguments
to attract those voters, but cultural conservatism among many working-class
whites will make it hard to win many of them over,” Skelley explained. “And
there’s no going back at this point for Democrats on social issues: they’ve
made gains by being a socially liberal party, probably more than from being an
economically moderate-to-liberal one.”
So, it isn’t too difficult to understand that disaffected
Democrats may be drawn to the Trump campaign. Democrats have tied their
political fortunes to aggressive social justice warriors, while the Republican
Party seems beholden to the corporate donor class.
The challenge for Trump, however, as the Times
notes, is that the disaffected Democrats and working class voters supporting
his campaign are among the least likely to vote in general elections. It is possible,
however, that they haven’t voted because they haven’t identified a candidate
they could support.
If Trump brings them to the polls, they could reshape
American politics for the next several years. Trump’s dominance of the polls
has confounded pundits for half the year. The results at the ballot box could
be even more surprising.
Comments
80% of
eligible voters in the US should be attracted to Trump because his priorities
include moves that would increase the number of jobs available to US citizens.
This includes all blue collar and service industry workers who have seen that
the excessive immigration maintained by Democrats and Republican establishment
officials is responsible for the lack of jobs. Trump is also favored by us
conservatives who want a return to the free market, private sector oriented
economy and the elimination of corruption and political correctness.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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