A victory for President Trump on November 3 hinges on his ability to turn out tens of millions of non-college-educated white voters, a leading Republican pollster says.
Public Opinion Strategies’ Micah Roberts said that if Trump wants to win the election against Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), he will need to rev up support from his non-college-educated white voting base.
CNBC reports:
For Trump, the election appears to boil down to his ability to dig deeper into the ranks of his unshakeable, but so far unexpandable, base of 40% of voters. If he closes the gap, “it’s because he’s changed the composition of the electorate in such a way that he’s driving turnout among White non-college grads and probably in the Midwest and in rural areas in swing states,” said Micah Roberts, partner with Public Opinion Strategies, who served as the Republican pollsters for the survey. [Emphasis added]
A recent New York Times analysis suggested a similar conclusion — that Trump needs to secure his base of support among non-college-educated white voters and bring more of them out to vote than they did in the 2016 presidential election.
The Times reported:
If Mr. Trump is to be successful turning out new voters, there are plenty in swing states, which remain bastions of the non-college-educated white vote. But most of these states have also been undergoing the same changes in the electorate as the country as a whole. [Emphasis added]
As FiveThirtyEight noted in September 2016, the largest untapped pool of likely Trump supporters are the more than 47 million non-college-educated white Americans who did not bother to vote in the 2012 presidential election.
FiveThirtyEight reported:
Here’s a scary stat for Democrats: In 2012, President Obama won re-election by almost 5 million votes, but about 47 million eligible white voters without a college degree — including 24 million men — didn’t bother to vote. In 2016, these nonvoters are part of the demographic that is most strongly in favor of Donald Trump.
In Wisconsin, alone, nearly 460,000 non-college-educated white men — the base of Trump’s coalition — did not vote. Trump won Wisconsin by less than 23,000 votes.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.