Donald Trump Is Killing It With White, Working-Class Voters In The Rust Belt

[eridani]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-working-class-voters_us

A third of the Trump supporters were so loyal that they claimed they would not vote for another candidate if Trump were not the nominee. Not surprisingly, "personality" was a greater factor than policy issues for many Trump backers. Almost half of the Trump contingent said they liked him particularly because he speaks his mind.

And that would partly explain this troubling finding for Democrats: One in four people who identified as Democrats said they were backing Trump.

The good news for Democrats and the rest of the Republican field was that a slight majority of 53 percent said they still hadn't settled on a candidate. As Working America put it in their paper, "key white-working class voters have not made up their minds yet in the 2016 presidential race, but of those who have, Donald Trump is the strongest choice."

Working America is a non-union wing of the AFL-CIO, known for its canvassing and ground game, particularly in the Rust Belt. The group knocked on doors outside Cleveland for obvious reasons: White, working-class voters make up more than half of the Ohio electorate. And as the old axiom says -- as Ohio goes, so goes the nation.

A lot of the "economically distressed" communities they went to for this canvass -- four counties and 11 cities in Ohio and Pennsylvania -- are "threaten[ing] to tip strongly toward the conservative populism embodied by Donald Trump’s rhetoric," Working America warned. The people they spoke to "are fearful about their economic circumstances and prospects, angry about politicians who fail to address their concerns, and skeptical about the role of government."

[Human101948]

1. They should stick to their principles...and stay home on Election Day...

"A third of the Trump supporters were so loyal that they claimed they would not vote for another candidate if Trump were not the nominee."

[In_The_Wind]

2. +1 !!!

[pampango]

3. Particularly with repubican-leaning white, working-class voters but with others as well.

New study shows Trump has potential to unite whites' "ethnic and economic anxieties into a powerful populist coalition".

(E)thnically conservative and economically progressive populists who want increased spending on Social Security and a decrease in immigration vastly outnumber political conservatives and business Republicans.

It appears from the PEPS data, then, that the Trump coalition unites resentment of minority groups with support for economically progressive policies.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/01/27/a-newly-released-poll-shows-the-populist-power-of-donald-trump/

How an obscure adviser to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996

(S)ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better…

(Samuel Francis in Chronicles)

[Ex Lurker]

5. Throw in rural white southereners, and that's the old populist coalition

of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's how you got progressive economic policies while maintaining Jim Crow and quotas on East European and Asian immigrants.

[DinahMoeHum]

4. Need a better link. . .thanks.

n/t