A party once split by ideology and religion has discovered a new fissure—class and education—that threatens to deliver a political earthquake.
Trump’s success at connecting with the economic and cultural anxieties of blue-collar whites largely explains why he hasn’t been damaged more by his disputes with groups that usually function as the gatekeepers for conservative support, from the Fox News Channel to National Review. Voters at Trump rallies are often quick to acknowledge he isn’t a typical Republican, or a classic conservative. Yet they don’t see his deviations from party orthodoxy as disqualifying because they view him as championing them against forces they view as threatening—from special interest influence in Washington to rapid demographic change. “I come out of a traditional Republican household,” said Tom Cotton, a retired law enforcement officer from Grinnell, Iowa, who attended a Trump rally in Marshalltown last week. “And let’s face it—he’s not a traditional Republican. But I truly believe he will give it everything he’s got to get things going again.”
The Polls May Be Underestimating Trump’s Support
It starts with working-class voters across developed countries being under severe economic pressure because of competition with foreigners at home (immigration) and abroad (EU/trade). They respond to people and parties who tell them this state of affairs isn’t inevitable, and they are often impervious to cries of racism. Their lives are just plain harder than they used to be and working-class voters don’t see elites doing much—or wanting to do much—to make them better. Donald Trump is simply the American version of Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, and many other European leaders of working-class, anti-immigrant parties who profit from stoking the flames of resentment because there is so much kindling available to light.
.. It turns out that a nontrivial share of these same working-class, anti-immigrant voters won’t tell a live person who they support but will share their true feelings when their support is secret—like on Election Day. This is no surprise: Support for immigration and globalization are perhaps the only political sentiments that unite elites from both business and the academy, from right and left.
.. This doesn’t mean Trump is on his way to the nomination. Public Policy Polling, an automated robocall pollster, consistently poses hypothetical one-on-one matchups between Trump and other GOP candidates. Though Trump regularly trashes Jeb Bush, Trump loses or runs roughly even with Bush in the Public Policy Polling one-on-ones. And it’s the same with all the other Republican candidates. Even when poll respondents are assured anonymity, there is simply a hard ceiling of support an anti-immigrant candidate can receive. When the field is more limited, Trump loses his edge. (General-election polls also show Trump does worse against the likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton than other leading Republican contenders do.)