The Week (Opinion)
By Paul Waldman
March 8, 2016
If there's one thing we know for sure about Donald Trump, it's that he's a candidate for white people.
This
would seem to be an almost insurmountable problem in an increasingly
diverse America, but some are beginning to suspect — either with hope or
fear, depending
on whom you ask — that Trump could win a general election by pulling in
large numbers of working-class white voters who are responding to his
message of alienation, anger, and resentment. As
The Wall Street Journal recently put it,
"Trump's success in attracting white, working-class voters is raising
the prospect that the Republican Party, in an electoral gamble, could
attempt to take an unexpected path to the White House that would run
through the largely white and slow-to-diversify
upper Midwest."
Indeed, if Trump were to win the White House, this would seem to be the only way. But it's not going to happen.
The idea rests on a number of misconceptions, the first of which is that there are millions of blue-collar whites who
would otherwise have voted Democratic, but who will vote for Donald Trump instead. As Chris Matthews
said in January, "I think there's a
lot of Reagan Democrats waiting to vote for him." The "Reagan
Democrats" to which he refers were Democrats who crossed party lines to
vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The
problem with this belief is that the Reagan Democrats are gone. Where
did they go? They became Republicans. The phenomenon of Reagan Democrats
was largely
about race, the continuation of a process that began when Lyndon
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Those
socially conservative whites who had voted Democratic in the past
shifted their allegiance, and they didn't go back.
You
can argue, and many people have, that the alienation of the Democratic
Party from the white working class is a serious problem for them, and
it's part
of what produces off-year defeats in years like 2010 and 2014. But
because of the country's changing demographics, the white working class
becomes a smaller and smaller portion of the voting public with each
election, particularly in presidential election
years when turnout is higher across the board. That's why Barack Obama
could lose
the white working class in 2012 by a staggering 26 points (62-36), and
still win the election comfortably. So if you're going to argue that
Donald Trump will ride these voters to victory, you'd have to believe
that he'd do not just better than Mitt Romney
did with them, but hugely better, so much so that it would overcome the advantages the Democratic nominee will have with other voters.
Consider,
for instance, the Latino vote. Mitt Romney won only 27 percent of
Latinos in 2012, an abysmal performance that convinced many Republicans
that if
they didn't "reach out" to this fast-growing segment of the electorate,
they might be unable to win the White House any time soon. Latinos will
be an even larger portion of the electorate this year than they were
four years ago. Now think what will happen
if Donald Trump, the man who made venomous antipathy toward immigrants
one of the cornerstones of his campaign, becomes the GOP nominee. Not
only would it be shocking if he got 20 percent of their votes, his
nomination will almost certainly spur higher turnout
among Latinos than we've ever seen before.
That's
another problem with the blue-collar whites theory of a Trump victory:
It rests on the idea that he'd bring out large numbers of those voters
who don't
vote often, but also requires that people opposed to Trump won't be
similarly motivated to turn out. "I find it just so implausible that we
could have this massive white nativist mobilization without also
provoking a big mobilization among minority voters,"
political scientist Ruy Teixeira recently told
The New Yorker. "It is kind of magical thinking that you could do one thing and not have the other."
Now
let's talk about that Rust Belt. Even if you believe that Trump would
do better in those states than recent Republicans have, it wouldn't be
enough unless
he was absolutely crushing the Democrat everywhere. The reason is that
Democrats start in an excellent position in the Electoral College. In
2012, President Obama won reelection with 332 electoral votes, a cushion
of 62 more than he needed. That means that
if the Democratic nominee can hold most of the states Obama won —
including swing states heavy with Latinos, like Florida, New Mexico, and
Colorado — she could lose Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes), Ohio (18
votes), and Michigan (16 votes) and still be elected
president.
I
suspect that many people have been led to believe that Trump could ride
white working-class votes to victory in the fall because he has
performed particularly
well with such voters in the Republican primaries. It only takes a
moment to realize the problem with this logic. The people voting in
Republican primaries are overwhelmingly, guess what,
Republicans. Yes, there are Republican-leaning independents
voting in those primaries, too, but they're mostly people who call
themselves independent but consistently vote Republican. They're already
in the GOP's camp; Trump would need them, plus a whole
lot more.
That's
not even to mention the moderate Republicans who are repulsed by Trump
and would either vote for the Democrat, vote for a third-party
candidate, or
just stay home. Donald Trump's problem in the general would be that he
has all kinds of voters who will oppose him, and be highly motivated to
do so; he is easily the
most unpopular candidate in either
party. He might pick up a few extra votes from those who respond to his
nativism and race-baiting, yet used to vote for Democrats. But there
just aren't enough of them, and it won't be
anything approaching what he'd need to win.
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