The 2016 exit-polls undercounted blue-collar white voters by almost 14 million and exaggerated the number of college-graduate voters by roughly 18 million, according to a report in the New York Times.
Columnist Thomas Edsall says the revised calculation should force Democrats to reduce their favoritism for the cultural policies which aid college-graduate progressives — and which also hurt blue-collar voters — before the next election in 2020:
By showing that the white working class makes up a larger proportion of the electorate than previously reported, the Pew report — taken together with similar results in a study sponsored in November 2017 by the liberal Center for American Progress — [the data] strengthens the case made by Democratic strategists calling for a greater emphasis on policies appealing to working class voters and a de-emphasis on so-called identity issues.
So far, however, the Democrats have doubled-down on their pro-diversity agenda — cheap-labor migration, transgenderism, globalist rules, speech regulations — in the run-up to the 2018 midterms.
The new turnout analysis should also pressure the GOP’s elites to embrace President Donald Trump’s populist pitch to the many millions of working-class voters who have been hit hard by global trade, mass immigration, and the social stratifications which ensures elite hostility to ordinary Americans. But, as shown by the 2018 omnibus, the GOP elite is still allied with the Democrats’ progressive elite in favoring divide-and-rule diversity, higher immigration, and lower wages.
Edsall warns: “The bottom line, as the 2016 election amply demonstrated, is that if the Democratic Party does not take the bull by the horns, someone else will.”
Edsall writes:
Exit polls are routinely conducted on Election Day by Edison Research for a consortium of news organizations. In 2016, exit polls estimated that the white working class cast a total of 34 percent, or 46.5 million votes out of the 136.67 million ballots cast.
The Pew study, in contrast, found that the white working class cast 44 percent, or 60.1 million votes, of all the 2016 votes for president — 13.5 million more votes than in the Edison Research exit polls.
At the same time, Pew found that whites with college degrees made up 30 percent of the total electorate, not the 37 percent reported in the exit polls. In other words, Pew found that white working-class voters outnumbered white college voters among all voters, while the exit polls reported just the opposite…
According to the November exit polls, half of the entire 2016 electorate [65 million out of 129 million voters] of all races had college degrees; Pew found that such well-educated voters were a much smaller 37 percent [47 million].
Read the article here.
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