What 'Democrats for dRumpf'?
Here's a nice piece of hopeful analysis, from Josh M Marshall's blog, telling us about the fake idea that dRumpf will appeal broadly to low income resentful whites. It has some not-pie-in-the-sky, useful reality-based data observations, which refutes the mass media's pretense that the moderate income white American electorate will switch in embittered droves to the gop's far-right candidate:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-reshuffling-the-deck
excerpt
" We can see from the polls and the rallies that Trump draws heavily from the white middle and working classes. A more specific marker is voters who do and don't have a college degree. But this isn't 1950 or 1965. The vast majority of those people are already Republican voters, if not always registered Republicans.
Here's the more operative question: if we're using the stereotype of 'white working class' voters, how many white working class voters do you think Trump will pull in the general election who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012? That second part of the equation is the critical one. Because if it's voters who were already in the Republican column it doesn't really matter in terms of reevaluating the 2000-2012 era electoral map. (Democrats would certainly love to get back some of those white voters; but that's a different question.) My gut sense is that the Obama '08, '12/Trump '16 number is pretty small. Maybe extremely small. If nothing else that hunch is backed up by a lot of highly suggestive if not dispositive polling data.
Let's consider some data.
In 2012, Mitt Romney won 59% of the white vote to Obama's 39%. And he lost. (In 2008, with McCain, it was 55% to 43%.) The most notable number is that Trump currently seems to be substantially underperforming that number. An ABC/Washington Post poll from early March found that Trump was winning white voters by a margin of 49% to 40% against Clinton. That's definitely winning the white vote. But it is not even close to the margin Mitt Romney got and still lost.
That number alone, if it holds up at all, should stop a lot of the 'reshuffling the deck' thinking in its tracks. That theory posits a sort of Braveheart-esque raging last gasp of white people putting Trump over the top. But at least at the moment, he's doing dramatically worse among whites than either of the last two guys who lost. That is, to put it mildly, a big problem for Trump.
The truth is that Trump would not only need to win dramatically more white voters than Romney (who lost); he'd need to expand the white electorate. Indeed, this claim comes up again and again. Trump, we're told, can motivate demoralized white voters who haven't voted recently or ever. But as Romney campaign strategist Stuart Stevens notes, this is fantasy. There aren't any missing white voters. The voting rate among whites has been going up like other demographic subgroups in recent years. There just aren't any missing ones out there, unless you opt for heroic/unicorn theories of turnout. "
This isn't to say that we shouldn't take dRumpf or any other far right creep nominee seriously. But this piece struck me as important and positive because though I've been paying attention to the unusual deference to (and shilling on behalf of) dRumpf by the media, I hadn't been seeing through the scary threatening bogeyman the same media was crafting about 'the massive legion' of angry white disaffected Americans who were going to put the dRumpenfuhrer over the top. The same media who's dishonestly pushing him is also dishonestly lying about demographics, in order to push him. It's 2 + 2, and I had been misreading it.
On an unrelated note, the blog's Tierney Sneed has been turning in some fantastic, very enjoyable reporting on TPM for a while now, and I just wanted to mention how good both her info and style are.
