9/14/15, "Q: (Among leaned Republicans) If the 2016 Republican presidential primary or caucus in your state were being held today, for whom would you vote? Which candidate would you lean toward?"
Trump 33
Carson 20
Bush 8
Cruz 7
Rubio 7
Paul 5
Kasich 3
Huckabee 3
Fiorina 2
Walker 2
Christie 1
Jindal 1
9/14/15, "Poll: Trump, Carson top GOP race; Clinton leads Dems but support drops," Washington Post, Dan Balz and Scott Clement
"Two non-politicians, businessman Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, dominate the contest for the Republican nomination, together accounting for more than half of the potential vote as support for traditional politicians continues to decline, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
In
the contest for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton has
lost significant ground over the past two months....She still leads the field of Democrats, but for the
first time her support has dropped below 50 percent in Post-ABC surveys,
with the biggest decline coming among white women....
The new poll found Trump to be the favorite of 33 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. That is a jump of nine percentage points since mid-July and a 29-point increase since late May, just before Trump announced his candidacy. He does well with most groups of GOP voters, but his strongest support comes from those who do not have a college degree and those with incomes below $50,000.
Carson runs second at 20 percent, 14 points higher than in July. His surge is consistent with several other national polls that show him moving up the ranks since the first Republican debate in Cleveland last month. Carson’s base is more strongly rooted in the conservative wing of the party.
After Trump and Carson, there is a significant falloff in support for the other candidates. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who began the year as the nominal GOP front-runner, stands at 8 percent, his lowest ever in Post-ABC surveys of the 2016 field. Next, at 7 percent each, are Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. No one else registered above 5 percent.
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie either tied or registered their lowest levels of support in Post-ABC polls of the 2016 race dating to the beginning of 2014.
Walker suffered the steepest decline since the July survey, falling from 13 percent to 2 percent. Recent polls in Iowa, where Walker had been leading, also have shown a loss of support....
The Post-ABC News poll was conducted Sept. 7-10 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults, including landline and cellphone respondents. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points."
"wapo.st/pollarchive."
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Among comments at Washington Post: One predicts Trump will move to the center should he secure the nomination. Response: He'll just be Romney again and worse if he does:
=================
"It’s foolish to blow off Trump's potential appeal to a significant segment of Democratic voters, especially after he pivots to the center once the nomination is secured."...
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1:14 AM EST [Edited]
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If
he pivots to the center in the general, you will have Romney all over
again -- and worse. "Who is this guy -- really?" I can hear it now.
The Dems would LOVE this. It's not all about the "outsider," which will
really be painfully illuminated should this occur."
...........................
9/14/15, "Detailed view" of Trump results across groups within Republican leaning sample, Washington Post poll:
Republicans 32%
Independents 31%
Moderate/Liberal 32%
Conservative 34%
Male 36%
Female 29%
Age 18-49 31%
Age 50+ 35%
No college degree 40%
College graduate 19%
Income less than $50K 43%
Income more than $50K 19%
White non-college 39%
White college 19%
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Added: Re: Unwanted working class voters, following are four articles, one from 2014 and three from 2013, explaining that the huge electoral bloc of working class Americans have been scorned by both political parties. Blue collar voters have been driven away from the Democrats. Assuming Republicans want to win they "need to become a party of the people:"
Following Oct. 2014 article was written when it was thought Romney might run for president again:
10/1/14, "Romney can't lead a more populist GOP," Timothy P. Carney, Washington Examiner
"Mitt Romney is a great person and a decent politician, but he also embodies the deepest problems in the Republican Party. He shouldn't run for president.
Republicans, if they want to control Congress or win the White House, need to become a party of the people. Romney may be the worst possible man to take the GOP in that direction.
Romney’s most telling moment in 2012 was when he told a crowd of rich donors that the 47 percent of the country that “pay no income tax” are unwinnable for Republicans, because they “are dependent upon government,” and “I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Romney has downplayed the comment as some sort of clumsy way of handling a rambling question. But he campaigned like he believed it. Romney focused on the upper-middle-class white suburbs that Bush had generally won and McCain had generally lost. The fruit of this effort: he improved about 1 percentage point on McCain’s performance in key Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania suburbs, while losing out on much of the blue-collar vote.
"The Missing White Voter" was how political analyst Sean Trende described it. Many blue-collar voters who used to be Democrats have since been turned off the party’s radical tack left on social issues, embrace of Hollywood elites, and evident disdain towards middle America (recall Obama’s candid remarks about folks bitterly clinging to guns and religion).
These voters, in lower-income suburbs, in exurbs, and in rural counties, aren’t ideologically committed to the GOP. They don’t care about capital gains tax cuts, and most aren’t avid pro-lifers.
These blue-collar voters driven away from the Democrats are loosely attached to the GOP.
Romney, a millionaire who looks like one, was never the guy to win them over. That he blasted many of them as freeloaders for the crime of paying only payroll taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, state income taxes, and sales taxes — but not federal income taxes — didn’t help.
The mainstream media often argues that the GOP is too ideologically extreme to win broadly, and that it needs to become more moderate. This analysis looks along the wrong axis. The real problem is that the GOP is too elite, and it needs to be more populist.
A more moderate GOP would forget about cutting taxes. A more populist GOP, on the other hand, would change its priorities on which taxes to cut. Instead of fighting for lower top rates and lower capital gains rates, a populist GOP would cut the payroll tax-- maybe creating a personal exemption, so that a worker isn’t paying taxes on his first dollar....
Romney’s campaign was also weakened by his inability to attack Obama’s corporatism. Obama’s least popular position was probably his crucial support for the Wall Street bailout. Romney backed it, too....
Romney also couldn't attack Obama's individual insurance mandate or the special deals Obama cut with drugmakers to pass Obamacare, because Obamacare was largely modeled on Romneycare.
The 2016 GOP nominee can't be a bailout-backer deployed from Wall Street and surrounded by K Street.
He or she will need to be the scourge of special interests who can present free enterprise as the great leveler and show that government intervention tilts the playing field toward the big guys.
Winning the White House will require a war on cronyism, especially if Hillary Clinton is the nominee.
The ethanol mandate, Obamacare’s insurance bailout,
the Export-Import Bank,
the sugar program, energy subsidies, Too Big to Fail-
these all need to be in Republicans' crosshairs. Traditionally, Romney favors programs like these.
Republicans are never going to get back the White Bread vote. They should go instead for the blue-collar vote. That means new priorities. And a new candidate."
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2013 article: Middle- and working-class Americans are an "electoral bloc that dwarfs any other in numerical terms,” but for decades neither party has wanted their votes:
12/16/13, “Re-Branding the GOP,” “From the party of big business to the party of the little guy,” NRO, By John Fonte
"As Sean Trende and others have noted middle- and working-class voters did not turn out for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election in the numbers that Republican leaders had expected. In the eyes of many of these once-Republican-leaning voters (including former Reagan Democrats), the GOP appears to be too closely linked to “big business.” In response, many conservative thinkers have called for a more populist GOP, oriented toward the middle and working classes and distant from corporate elites.
It is time to reexamine the relationship between big business and the American center-right.
While corporate America has a close relationship with the Republican party generally, its engagement with American conservatism is fraught with complications. Business leaders and conservatives often join forces for pragmatic gain on significant issues such as Obamacare, taxes, trade policy, cap-and-trade proposals, and other environmental and government regulations. This issue-by-issue alliance is tactically useful to both groups and no doubt will (and should) continue.
.
Republicans as a party, however, and conservatives specifically, should not be subservient to corporate interests on core issues. The American electorate must come to view Republicans as the party of the middle class rather than the courtiers of big business. The GOP “brand” must change.
While conservatives and business will remain part of a broad center-right coalition, the key question is: On what terms, and who calls the shots?...
All too often, the interests of corporate elites overlap with those of high-profile Republican donors and lawmakers....
Immigration politics is at the heart of the divide between conservative populist groups, on one side, and corporate elites within the GOP on the other. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama wrote a memo in July to his fellow Republican lawmakers, calling on them to “flip the immigration debate on its head.” At National Review Online, Sessions urged the GOP to “adopt a humble and honest populism” and distance itself from “the corporate titans who believe the immigration policy for our entire country should be modeled to pad their bottom line.”
........................
The GOP lost the 2012 election, Sessions said, “because it hemorrhaged support from middle and low-income Americans of all backgrounds,” and the party must now mount an “unapologetic defense of working Americans.” He noted that Americans oppose by a two-to-one margin increasing low-skilled immigration and also strongly oppose any legalization of illegal immigrants before border security is in place. Sessions made the key political point that Republicans have a golden opportunity to appeal once again to Reagan Democrats, who are, as John O’Sullivan put it in a statement lauding Sessions, an “electoral bloc that dwarfs any other in numerical terms.”...
Immigration is the first issue on which to turn this accusation back against Democrats and seize the moral high ground by speaking up for the real underdog, the American worker. Let us begin the re-branding, as Jeff Sessions suggests, with conservatives and the GOP vigorously and unapologetically opposing all legislation that increases low-skilled immigration and denouncing “comprehensive immigration reform” for what it is:
- against the well-being and way of life of the American middle and working classes.”
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7/28/2013, article #3 on disdain by both political parties for non-college whites:
................
In Nov. 2012 Obama won "just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since 1984." AP
................ .
7/28/13, "4 in 5 in US face near-poverty, no work," AP, Hope Yen
"Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream. Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.
............
The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality. ............
Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."
...................
"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend, but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.
..................
"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."
...............
While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in government data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.
............
The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.
.............
"It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty.
...............
He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not.
...............
"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.
....................
Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites are generally dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white.
................
Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are also numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains. More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.
...............
Still, while census figures provide an official measure of poverty, they're only a temporary snapshot. The numbers don't capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.
.....................
In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person's lifetime risk, a much higher number — 4 in 10 adults — falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.
...............
The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.
................
By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.
.................
By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.
.............
"Poverty is no longer an issue of 'them', it's an issue of 'us'," says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. "Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need."
............
Rank's analysis is supplemented with figures provided by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.
Among the findings:
.................
—For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households who were living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.
...............
—The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods — those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more — has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teen pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, up from 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.
The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped sharply, from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children ticked higher, from 38 to 39 percent.
..................
Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, which is conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.
................
The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class: 49 percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of non-whites who consider themselves working class.
..............
Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since 1984.
...................
Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential "decisive swing voter group" if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections.
...................
They don't trust big government, but it doesn't mean they want no government," says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group.
...............
"They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them.""
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Article #4 on abandoned working class whites: Sean Trende analysis, 2012's 'missing' white voters were blue collar, 6.1 million in number, and with them GOP can easily win without Hispanics. (Rockefeller Republicans who run the GOP E would rather lose than be the party of working class whites):
6/21/13, "The Case of the Missing White Voters, Revisited," Real Clear Politics, Sean Trende
"Regardless of whether Republicans could or should back the (immigration) bill, it simply isn’t necessary for them to do so and remain a viable political force.
1. The most salient demographic change from 2008 to 2012 was the drop in white voters....
I did some preliminary work in November 2012 suggesting that the largest change came from white voters dropping out. Now, with more complete data, we can re-assess this in a more precise manner. Using the most commonly accepted exit-poll numbers about the 2008 electorate*, we can roughly calculate the number of voters of each racial group who cast ballots that year. Using census estimates, we can also conclude that all of these categories should have increased naturally from 2008 to 2012, due to population growth.
From mid-2008 to mid-2012, the census estimates that the number of whites of voting age increased by 3 million. If we assume that these “new” voters would vote at a 55 percent rate, we calculate that the total number of white votes cast should have increased by about 1.6 million between 2008 and 2012.
The following table summarizes these estimates for all racial groups, and compares the results to actual turnout.
Now, the raw exit-poll data haven’t come out yet, so we can’t calculate the 2012 data to tenths: The white vote for 2012 could have been anywhere between 71.5 percent of the vote or 72.4 percent (with 26,000 respondents, analysis to tenths is very meaningful). So the final answer is that there were 6.1 million fewer white voters in 2012 than we’d have expected, give or take a million.**
The Current Population Survey data roughly confirm this. As I noted earlier, if you correct the CPS data to account for over-response bias, it shows there were likely 5 million fewer whites in 2012 than in 2008. When you account for expected growth, we’d find 6.5 million fewer whites than a population projection would anticipate.
This is the real ballgame regarding demographic change in 2012. If these white voters had decided to vote, the racial breakdown of the electorate would have been 73.6 percent white, 12.5 percent black, 9.5 percent Hispanic and 2.4 percent Asian -- almost identical to the 2008 numbers.
2. These voters were largely downscale, Northern, rural whites. In other words, H. Ross Perot voters.
Those totals are a bit more precise and certain (and lower) than my estimates from November of last year. With more complete data, we can now get a better handle regarding just who these missing white voters were.
Below is a map of change in turnout by county, from 2008 to 2012 [at link]. Each shade of blue means that turnout was progressively lower in a county, although I stopped coding at -10 percent. Similarly, every shade of red means that turnout was progressively higher, to a maximum of +10 percent...
The drop in turnout occurs in a rough diagonal, stretching from northern Maine, across upstate New York (perhaps surprisingly, turnout in post-Sandy New York City dropped off relatively little), and down into New Mexico. Michigan and the non-swing state, non-Mormon Mountain West also stand out. Note also that turnout is surprisingly stable in the Deep South; Romney’s problem was not with the Republican base or evangelicals (who constituted a larger share of the electorate than they did in 2004)....
What does that tell us about these voters? As I noted, they tended to be downscale, blue-collar whites. They weren’t evangelicals; Ross Perot was pro-choice, in favor of gay rights, and in favor of some gun control. You probably didn’t kow that, though, and neither did most voters, because that’s not what his campaign was about.
His campaign was focused on his fiercely populist stance on economics. He was a deficit hawk, favoring tax hikes on the rich to help balance the budget. He was staunchly opposed to illegal immigration as well as to free trade (and especially the North American Free Trade Agreement). He advocated more spending on education, and even Medicare-for-all. Given the overall demographic and political orientation of these voters, one can see why they would stay home rather than vote for an urban liberal like President Obama or a severely pro-business venture capitalist like Mitt Romney.
3. These voters were not enough to cost Romney the election, standing alone....
Give that whites overall broke roughly 60-40 for Romney, this seems unlikely. In fact, if these voters had shown up and voted like whites overall voted, the president’s margin would have shrunk, but he still would have won by a healthy 2.7 percent margin.
At the same time, if you buy the analysis above, it’s likely that these voters weren’t a representative subsample of white voters. There were probably very few outright liberal voters (though there were certainly some), and they were probably less favorably disposed toward Obama than whites as a whole. Given that people who disapprove of the president rarely vote for him (Obama’s vote share exceeded his favorable ratings in only four states in 2012), my sense is that, if these voters were somehow forced to show up and vote, they’d have broken more along the lines of 70-30 for Romney.
This still only shrinks the president’s margin to 1.8 percent, but now we’re in the ballpark of being able to see a GOP path to victory (we’re also more in line with what the national polls were showing). In fact, if the African-American share of the electorate drops back to its recent average of 11 percent of the electorate and the GOP wins 10 percent of the black vote rather than 6 percent (there are good arguments both for and against this occurring; I am agnostic on the question), the next Republican would win narrowly if he or she can motivate these “missing whites,” even without moving the Hispanic (or Asian) vote."
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