WaPo (2016) - Donald Trump got Reagan-like support from union households [View all]

[TomCADem]

Thanks to Bernie Sanders attacking from the left, Trump from the right, and Russia all around, Trump was able to convince union members to support him over Hillary Clinton, a life long liberal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/10/donald-trump-got-reagan-like-support-from-union-households/?utm_term=.fd53562898b0

From Day One, Donald Trump's dream has been to be the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan. "Make America Great Again" is a retread of an old Reagan slogan and Trump has, in response to past interview questions, said that the Reagan era was the "great" to which his slogan refers. It was the time that Donald Trump became Donald Trump™, down to "The Art of the Deal."

His campaign strategy was to lure working-class Democrats to his cause, just the way Reagan did. That Reagan had already lured them was incidental; Trump insisted that he would engender the love of those blue-collar voters and win because of them.

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Trump's depiction of who those voters were centered on two broad archetypes: Veterans and displaced factory workers. There isn't good polling on the former, but it overlaps with the white, non-college-educated men who made up a significant part of Trump's base. In one formulation of the latter, union members, we have data from exit polling. In union households (that is, households in which someone was a union member), Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by only 8 points, a substantial improvement from how Mitt Romney did in 2012.

In fact, it was the best margin for a Republican since ... 1984, the election that gave Reagan his second term.