Donald Trump’s Secret Weapon: Blue-State Voters
There’s a remarkably strong correlation, for example, between Mr. Trump’s support and the number of racist Web searches by state. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight said that the measure was the single strongest correlation of support for Mr. Trump that he could find.
Survey data point toward the same finding. For instance, support for Mr. Trump was strongly correlated with higher levels of resentment about racial issues — like the belief that black people don’t work hard enough and yet receive special favors — in an analysis of the American National Election 2016 Pilot Study.
.. But Nixon’s “Southern strategy” had a Northeastern component, and it drew plenty of old Democrats into the Republican Party. In his influential book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” the Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips noted the declining Democratic strength among Northeastern Catholics in the 1960s, in part because of the view that “Negroes or other minority groups are taking over the Democratic Party.” His prediction that the Republican Party would become more Catholic and populist has been borne out.
.. It is in the Midwest and West where Mr. Trump has struggled. There, the traditional Republicans — white Protestants — still reign. They have bled support to the Democrats in many places, like Iowa or Oregon, but the Republicans have not replaced them with an influx of new voters as they have in the South or the industrial North.