President Trump has work to do to ensure he can replicate his strong 2016 showing among working-class white voters, crucial to his Electoral College victory, this fall.
While Trump remains the heavy favorite among this voting bloc, public polling suggests his margins are smaller, and turnout, especially in the battleground states, will be key.
This runs counter to the conventional wisdom that has prevailed since Trump announced his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination in 2015. Some Republicans feared he would reduce the party’s share of the Hispanic vote as dramatically and enduringly as Barry Goldwater did with the black vote in 1964 and that there simply weren’t enough white voters available to offset this loss.
But Trump held and even slightly improved on Mitt Romney’s share of most minority voting blocs, including Hispanics, while taking the disproportionately white working-class Rust Belt away from the Democrats. A number of polls taken this year suggest he has actually enhanced his standing among Hispanics, with a few also showing more modest inroads with black men.
But suburban white voters may have turned sharply enough against Trump to balance these gains, and his numbers among white people without college degrees are below the landslide margins that helped propel him into the White House last time around.
A recent Fox News poll found Trump winning 41% of Hispanics nationally, up considerably from the 28% he won according to the 2016 exit polls. The same survey showed him carrying 55% of noncollege white voters, down significantly from the 66% he captured on Election Day four years ago.
A detailed Reuters poll tells a similar story, showing Trump’s edge with noncollege white people falling from 21 points in May to 12 points in August. His 46% among this group is down 20 points from what the exit polls showed him winning in 2016.
But this is not entirely due to Democratic challenger Joe Biden’s vaunted blue-collar touch — the former vice president’s 34% among white voters without college degrees is only a modest improvement from Hillary Clinton’s 29%.
Possible explanations for the dip in blue-collar support range from the coronavirus to Trump pursuing too conventional a Republican agenda for most of his term. Others think it is an engagement issue well within Trump’s power to fix.
While most postmortems of Romney’s 2012 defeat at the hands of President Barack Obama focused on the Hispanic vote, an analysis by RealClearPolitics’s Sean Trende just after Election Day hypothesized that the “missing white voters” played an important role. These whites were heavily working class, rural, and disconnected from the global economy compared to their urban and suburban counterparts. This forecast Trump’s path to victory four years later.
Yet while Trump’s struggles in the suburbs are well documented, pollsters have found it more difficult to keep their fingers on the pulse of the white working class — a major reason the 2016 results in states such as Wisconsin were such a surprise and a factor in why some prognosticators still take Biden’s current lead with a grain of salt.
“He is doing as well as he did in 2016 with that group,” Bill McCoshen, a Republican strategist in Wisconsin, said of the president’s white working-class support. “The intensity of support for Trump on the ground here is actually better than it was in 2016, and the ground game is substantially better. He needs to shore up the suburbs to win here.”
Observers on the ground in Pennsylvania, another critical battleground state, say much the same thing. “He’s doing well, but it’s not enough,” said veteran Republican political consultant Christopher Nicholas of Trump’s white working-class showing. “I can see him getting more raw votes in Philadelphia this time than last time. His problem is that we’ve got suburbs all over the state … Biden is doing better in those suburbs than Clinton.”
Trump has, since the Republican convention, hit Biden for an initially tepid response to urban rioting and support for trade and other policies he contends send American jobs overseas. “For 47 years, Joe Biden took the donations of blue-collar workers, gave them hugs and even kisses, and told them he felt their pain — and then he flew back to Washington and voted to ship their jobs to China and many other distant lands,” he said in his acceptance speech. “Joe Biden spent his entire career outsourcing the dreams of American workers, offshoring their jobs, opening their borders, and sending their sons and daughters to fight in endless foreign wars.”
Team Trump believes this is the message that helped the campaign turn the Rust Belt red for the first time since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. It is a sale the team is going to have to make a second time around to repeat that showing with the president’s blue-collar white base.
“President Trump made significant inroads with blue-collar America in 2016, and we are confident that he will build on those electoral gains this November,” said Trump campaign spokesman Ken Farnaso. “President Trump’s America First agenda resonates with people in the heartland who know that the last thing they need is Joe Biden’s $4 trillion tax hike and his job-killing Green New Deal.”
