lpetrich
Contributor
Trump 2020 polls: White-collar revolt against the President is peaking - CNNPolitics
Trump has evoked Richard Nixon by talking about "law and order" and about how a "silent majority" is on his side. But this isn't 1968.From his open defiance of public health officials when holding rallies to his increasingly explicit embrace of White racial backlash, President Donald Trump has set a course for his reelection campaign that could produce the GOP's largest deficit in the history of modern polling among well-educated White voters.
Relative to other Republicans, Trump has underperformed with those voters since he began his first presidential campaign in 2015. And by flouting science and openly inflaming racial tensions, he is now directly centering the campaign debate on two of the principal dynamics that have alienated those voters from him. That shows signs of accelerating the shift of these voters -- who had never backed a Democratic presidential nominee in polling before 2016 -- away from the GOP to an unprecedented new level.
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Trump has always tried to convince his primarily non-college and non-urban White base that he "alone" can protect them from the twin forces he portrays as threatening their interests: contemptuous elites who allegedly disdain their values and dangerous minorities and immigrants who purportedly threaten their jobs and their physical safety.
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Observers in both parties believe Trump sees his defiance of local officials and medical experts on the rallies as a way to reinforce his identity as an outsider who will break the rules to defend his voters' interests. But on both sides, many believe that approach carries enormous risk, particularly with older and college-educated voters, both of whom have displayed elevated levels of concern about the pandemic.
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Trump holding the rallies despite the advice of public health officials is "just continued fodder for ignoring expert advice, which has always been a deep concern that the voters have had," Gourevitch said. "They also play into the self-absorption aspect that he needs these rallies for himself and his own reelection rather than the good of the people."
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Republican consultant Alex Conant, the communications director for Sen. Marco Rubio's 2016 presidential campaign, says such numbers among well-educated voters (as well as comparable weakness among seniors) show the price of Trump's downplaying of the crisis and his open defiance of public health officials.
The Republicans risk losing more suburban House seats, adding to their losses in 2018, and they risk losing Senate seats because of metro-area voters in several states. AZ, CO, ME, NC, and maybe also IA and GA. Also, long-time Republican states like AZ, GA, and TX are becoming battlegrounds.In a striking finding, Quinnipiac this month found that college-educated Whites, by 2-to-1, said that having Trump as President made them feel less safe rather than more. By comparison, Whites without degrees, by a 20-point margin, said Trump made them feel more safe.
The Navigator polls likewise found that two-thirds of college Whites expressed concern that at moments of crisis Trump makes things worse "with ... inflammatory words and actions."
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All of this signals that November could produce perhaps the largest gap ever between Whites with and without college degrees. In most state and national polls, Trump consistently maintains a huge advantage of at least 2-to-1 among blue-collar White men, his best group in 2016.
And while surveys consistently show Trump's margin among blue-collar White women declining from 2016, in most polls he maintains at least some lead with them.
Trump has aimed his responses to the two major crises of 2020 almost entirely at his base of non-college, non-urban voters while slighting the concerns that well-educated metropolitan voters have consistently expressed in polls. That reflects the belief among many Republicans that his most likely path to victory is by turning out even more of his base voters than in 2016, especially in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the three Rust Belt states that keyed his election.
GOP pollster Whit Ayres and other Republicans also say Trump might reclaim at least some ground among well-educated White votes by portraying Biden as a threat to raise their taxes and to damage the economy and their stock portfolios.
But Conant, the GOP consultant, says Trump has dug himself a large hole in the white-collar suburbs by responding so cavalierly to the two national earthquakes that have riveted their attention.
"He really doesn't want to talk about the pandemic, which is all everyone in America is thinking about," Conant said. "It's the same thing with the Black Lives Matter protests, as well. He really didn't want to talk about George Floyd, which is what everyone in America was talking about for a month. When you have that kind of disconnect between the leader and the voters you see it in the potential [electoral] wave that is now more likely than not."