One of the noticeable features of last night’s US Presidential debate (see full transcript here) was how Donald Trump was goaded into saying things to damage his chances with key constituencies. His “stop and frisk” proposal will not, I suspect, go down well with African American communities. Mention of his criticism of Alicia Machado, a hispanic former Miss Universe, probably met with displeasure from women and Hispanics. There was the airing of the “birther” controversy and a whole series of Trump favourites, as he was very successfully goaded by Hillary Clinton.
This was, in microcosm, the story of this year’s US Presidential Election. Donald Trump has worked himself into an electoral bunker whereby he has offended everyone except white people with a non-college education. Rather than seriously attempt to curry favour with key constituencies such as women, Black Americans and Hispanics, he has, instead, doubled down on non-college whites. He is going all out to try to win by getting a high vote from them. His campaign team has confirmed that this is their strategy.
According to The Atlantic:
White men and women who didn’t graduate college make up 62 percent of (Trump) supporters. Only 9 percent are black, Asian, or Latino.
It’s worth listening to this interview with US political strategist Jim Messina on Political Wire. He outlines how the battleground states where Trump is showing the strongest support are ones with highly numerous non-college educated white populations (e.g Iowa) and those where he is not doing well are those with highly numerous Hispanic and/or black communities. He lists Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and Pennsylvania as states where a Presidential candidate simply can’t win without getting minorities on board.
In 1992, minorities made up 13% of American voters. Now it is 30%. George W Bush got 44/46% repsectively of Latino voters in his elections. Mitt Romney got 27%. Trump is polling well below Romney’s level.
As Messina said, winning a US election is wildly different from winning a Republican Primary. I suppose one can’t rule out a scenario whereby Trump gets an extraordinarily high white vote in the right places, and manages to act presidential for a sufficiently lengthy period to gain a modicum of minority votes. However, at the moment that doesn’t seem likely. Last night’s debate suggests he just get this basic concept. Hillary Clinton is proving particularly adept at painting him into a corner where he just can’t win.
That said, a completely different Trump could come back at the second debate. And Hillary Clinton has not entirely set out a vision for America so far. She has no “hopey changey thing”. She needs to do this.
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Away day
The Keir Starmer we never got
Indecision costing the taxpayers millions
1963: London's summer of the Hoverbus
Abrial Jerram
Tanya Park
Peter Martin
19 Comments
Monmouth University ran a poll in August that showed Hilary doing well. However, even that poll showed:
“Trump holds sizable leads among white men without a college degree (31 points; 56% to 25%), white men with a college degree (11 points; 45% to 34%), and white women without a college degree (17 points; 49% to 32%).”
I don’t think this was a “rogue” poll, the few polls I’ve seen show Trump with a lead in the “white men with a college degree group”. Among white women with a college degree Clinton was 30% ahead, but that’s still an awful lot of well educated people voting for Trump.
Paul: Please excuse the pedantry, but the headline contains a zeugma ( a word I met in a crossword, which could have led to cross words). If someone is described as ‘a former Conservative MP’ is he a former MP? such as Matthew Parris, or a former Conservative? such as Michael Portillo, or both?
Quality newspapers often combine these with anachronisms, creating an ambiguity in which a former party leader, such as Michael Howard, who is a peer, could perhaps have been party leader when a peer, which he was not.
OK Richard, I’ve inserted a hyphen which hopefully de-zeugmatises the headline!
Paul,
I not entirely sure that this is a battle between educated and un-educated voters. It is possible to be educated and still emotional. Trump is mining the same seam as Corbyn, Farage, Le Pen, Tsipras and many other mini-demagogues. That is frustration and anger with the political ‘establishment’ (and I am afraid that includes us). The ‘people’ feel that the current crop of politicians are motivated only by a lucrative career in politics and not to lead and to serve.
Worse, they don’t even seem good at their job as debt balloons, deficits grow and still the fabric of or society looks more and more threadbare day by day.
When the world has small problems the centre ground is the political place to be, but when the problems seem insurmountable, then ever more extreme voices are listened to.
That path leads to disaster and what is needed (it should be from us) is a “Radical Moderate” agenda that constructs a state which isn’t Santa Claus but neither stands idly by while naked capitalism devours the weak.
Occasional viewers may have noticed cultural differences in the American language. People keep their former titles. There is not, yet, a confusion between the former President Clinton and the next one, but there are two Presidents Bush to be distinguished from each other by their middle initials. George H W Bush reluctantly accepts ‘George Bush senior’ but George W Bush is not usually described as ‘junior’ perhaps because he has a brother who stood for the Republican nomination in 2016 but was defeated by Donald Trump. This may sound pedantic, but both Presidents Bush invaded Iraq, the first to free Kuwait, the second to remove Saddam.
I’ve learned lots of new words thanks to LibDem voice. Today’s is zeugma. Recently I learned ‘meme’ and ‘trope’
Is this actually true? Are there no other kinds of trump supporters at all and no white none college educated anti Trump voters. Oh, I see white men without college degrees are the worst aren’t they! Running around working and being plumbers and stuff. And old people. They’re bad too. And people who don’t live in cities. They’re bad as well.
Glenn – if you follow the link in the article to The Atlantic you’ll see a detailed breakdown of Trump’s supporters which includes a small proportion of college-educated people and minorities.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/dissecting-donald-trumps-support/499739/
The point is that to win key battleground states, Trump can’t do it but doubling down on his core constituency of white non-college educated people. He needs to reach out to minorities, otherwise the electoral maths doesn’t add up for him. The demographics of the USA has significantly changed over the last 25 years, and it is no longer possible to become President without getting a significant amount of minority support.
By the way, I am male, white, old, haven’t got a college degree and don’t live in a city. I worked for quite a long time as a warehouse attendant and fork lift driver.
Paul.
I’m not interested in a detailed breakdown of anyone’ s supporters because it’s almost invariably used to undermine those voters.. It like when people use “metropolitan elite” to have a pop at policies they don’t like. People vote in all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons. The social bracket they’re from doesn’t interest me. I think that kind of thinking turns political strategy into a branch of advertising with demographics and market focused targeting, which in turn reduces the scope of policy because some “markets” are seen as unfashionable or not prestigious enough. I think it’s one of the reasons there’s a tendency to view wooing the press as more important than representing the electorate. And ultimately it’s also one of the reasons why you get voter alienation.
My feeling about Trump is that he won’t take Swing States mainly because small c-conservatism will kick in. At the moment a lot Democrats are uncomfortable with Clinton, but people by and large become cautious at the ballot box. So I think a combination of Trump’s flakiness and last minute reluctant support will swing it heavily it to Clinton.
I wonder whether Trump managed to damage himself with those non-college-educated whites with his debate performance. I suspect not many of them, especially those who lost or struggled to keep their homes, will be impressed by his assertion that taking advantage of the housing crisis was “just business”. Similarly, his statememt about not paying federal taxes makes him smart won’t go down well with working taxpayers. These are absolute gifts for the Democrats and I expect them to hammer him on these for the next few weeks.
Paul,
I align with Glenn here. I think the op-ed you penned here triggers a debate beyond Trump’s chances but moves into segmentation, and thus targeting, of the electorate.
I haven’t an answer but the traditional use of socio-economic groups and ethnicity may be misleading a lot of parties (and pollsters).
I suspect there are more important emoional and belief system coefficients that are driving the upsets we are seeing, but these may be hard to measure.
Certainly, I think voters everywhere are fed up of the nebulous Obama “Yes, We can!” and “Change” and want to hear concrete proposals.
Trump’s wall may be daft but it’s “concrete” and “ban all Muslims” is even dafter but they are more conprehensible than “Change”.
I have no desire to pigeonhole anyone, either writers for LDV or voters for Trump. It might be useful to consider Nassim Taleb’s recent characterization of the “IYI” : https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577#.lwwka6wla
I think Taleb makes an unfair generalization about a broad group of concerned and engaged citizens. But of course he is ultimately pointing out that such a broad-brush analysis is no different to saying that the US Presidential election reduces to “red-neck white guys versus everyone else”.
As for the second debate, it is now clear that Trump intends to discuss the skeletons (both real and imaginary) in the Clinton family closet. It’s going to be bruising.
Paul (Murray)
I have linked to the Atlantic analysis to make clear that there are college educated people voting for Trump and I never mentioned gender in the context of non-college-educated.
I repeat the point I was trying to make because we are danger of getting into a discussion about being anti-red-necked white guys, which would be outside the point I was trying to make. In order to win a US election you need to win the electoral college. To win the electoral college you have to win states like Colorado or Virginia which have significant minority voter communities. You can’t win Virginia or Colorado without winning significant amounts of the minority votes. At the moment Trump is not favoured by anything like the number of minority voters he needs to win those battleground states (with the exception of Iowa and others where the minority vote is not as high) and therefore become President.
And by the way, any mention of Bill Clinton’s affairs just makes people feel sorry for Hillary Clinton and increases her favourability ratings.
‘Zeugma’ is in the 1964 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and is in Chambers 1964.
‘Trope’ is an ironical use of a word, better explained in Chambers, new to me.
‘Meme’ is a neologism, which is why we use online dictionaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme.
Former leader Paddy Ashdown said “I have been a learner all my life.”
Speaking to an American friend yesterday, he firmly believes Trump will win. He suggested that there are “shy black Trump voters” i.e. those who will vote for Trump but won’t admit it within their communities. That coupled with a high turn-out from his fanatical core support, and reluctant support from moderate but Clinton-hating Republicans will be enough.
Trump will lose because he has alienated overweight people and in particular overweight women.
The thing about the U.S. Presidential election is that it isn’t one national contest, it is 50 state contests to elect members of the Electoral College. I find that the best way of understanding the actual situation is to look at Nate Silver’s excellent FiveThrityEight site (538 being the total number of electoral college votes).
I’m not sure if LDV allows links to be posted, so if this doesn’t show up, simply google FiveThirtyEight presidency
http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/?ex_cid=rrpromo
Knowing that Nigel is as much a fan of The West Wing as I am, and thinking of Trump’s contradictory response on Nuclear First Stike (giving the impression that he simply hasn’t thought much about such issues) reminded me of Jed Bartlett’s memorable comment to his Republican opponent Governor Richie:
“In the future, if you’re wondering: ‘Crime. Boy, I don’t know,’ is when I decided to kick your ass.”
I think no-one should underestimate the dire possibility of a Trump win. The fact that the opinion polls up to the recent TV debate showed such close figures after all the bilge poured out by Trump over a long period should stifle any assumptions that Hillary is a shoo-in. Polls after the debate ( in which Clinton undoubtedly thrashed Trump) are beginning to show a bounce for Clinton but not all that big.
Trumpites will still vote for Trump. I think more attention should now be directed by the Clinton camapaign towards those who say they will vote for one of the minor candidates. Are they really content with risking a Trump victory?