He loves the poorly educated

Created
Wed, 12/04/2023 - 06:00
Updated
Wed, 12/04/2023 - 06:00
And they love him Ron Brownstein on Trump’s trump card: Even amid all his legal challenges, Donald Trump has a secret weapon in his drive to win the Republican presidential nomination next year: polling strongly suggests he has transformed the GOP primary electorate in a way that will make him harder to beat. Since Trump’s emergence as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, the college-educated voters generally most skeptical of him have declined as a share of all GOP primary voters, while the voters without a college degree generally most sympathetic to him have increased, an array of public and private polls indicate. Those changes suggest Trump has set in motion what could prove a self-fulfilling prophecy: compared to when he first captured the nomination in 2016, he’s encouraged more participation in the Republican primaries by the blue-collar voters most inclined to support him and less by the white-collar voters likely to become the centerpiece of any coalition against him. “There’s no question about it,” says long-time GOP pollster Whit Ayres. “He has drawn people into the Republican Party who are more likely to support him and people like him and he has driven out of the Republican Party people who were more likely to support candidates George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney.” This transformation of the Republican electorate is critical because attitudes in the GOP about Trump vary enormously along educational lines – what political analysts have often termed the divide between well-educated “wine track” and non-college educated “beer track”…