GREG SARGENT, WASHINGTON POST
Donald Trump’s continued antics — such as his ongoing racist attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel — have many Republicans worried that he is further deepening the demographic hole that threatens to swallow up the GOP in this election cycle. Yet Trump seems blithely unconcerned. Perhaps he can’t imagine he is actually alienating key general election constituencies. Or maybe he thinks such tactics will unleash a mighty wave of white working class backlash that will allow him to make great gains in the industrial Midwest.
Whatever Trump’s thinking, a new demographic analysis of the electorate published today by The Upshot’s Nate Cohn helps deepen our understanding of both the opportunities and challenges for Trump when it comes to maximizing the white vote. It has both good news and bad news for Trump, and while your mileage may vary, it seems to me that the bad news is more significant.
To greatly oversimplify matters, Cohn finds that if you look closely at census and voter file data, the electorate was actually somewhat whiter in 2012 than most analysts think. Yet Obama was able to win reelection anyway — because he actually did somewhat better among white voters than is commonly thought. This was obscured by the fact that Obama performed poorly on a national level among whites — yet that overall performance was driven by his truly abysmal showing among southern whites, meaning he did better among northern ones than the national numbers suggested.
Thus, there could be more white voters out there in 2016 than we expect, which could be good news for Trump, because it could allow him more room to grow than we thought. The problem for him, though, is that Obama did better than commonly thought among northern whites, particularly young and college educated ones, partly because their cultural liberalism is more in tune with the Democratic Party than with the GOP. If we assume that Trump won’t be more competitive with those voters than Romney was, or that Trump might lose ground among them — given his full blown bigotry and hostility towards women — this means Trump will have to run up truly astronomical numbers among working class whites to win.
The rub, though, is that he’ll have to do that in the battleground states, not just in the south. Here’s Cohn’s state-by-state breakdown of what he’d have to accomplish (click to enlarge):
To win these key battleground states, Trump would have to do substantially better among working class whites than Romney did, all things being equal. But he would have to do even better still among them if he underperforms Romney among Latinos and college educated whites, which is a perfectly reasonable possibility.
As Cohn finds, if you assume modest losses among those groups, Trump would have to improve his share of the blue collar white vote by eight points in Florida, 10 points in Wisconsin, 12 points in Michigan, 11 points in Virginia, eight points in Pennsylvania, and six points in Ohio.
That might be possible, and we should not underestimate Trump or expect that defeating him will be easy. Still, it would be hard. This is the demographic trap that analyst Ruy Teixeira and others have identified: The more Trump does to maximize gains among blue collar whites, the more he may anger and alienate nonwhites and socially tolerant college educated whites, potentially offsetting any gains Trump makes among the former. By the way, this trap could be further exacerbated if Trump disgusts white women in yuuuuge numbers. If Trump figures out that he’s at great risk of alienating these groups, perhaps he can turn things around. But he seems incapable of even contemplating that possibility.