A poll conducted on Election Night finds that working class voters — whites without a college degree — are now as staunchly part of the Republican base as blacks and Hispanics are lopsidedly Democratic.
The survey by pollster Stan Greenberg shows that President-elect Donald Trump’s largest bloc of support in the election came from white non-college men, by a 72-23 percent margin over Hillary Clinton. The GOP candidate’s second strongest base of support consisted of white non-college class women, by a 61-35 percent margin.
That approaches the devotion on the Democratic side by black voters, with an 88-8 percent edge for Clinton, and Hispanics, at 65-29 percent.
This new coalition led by Trump, the poll found, has a decidedly unfriendly view of the wealthy and corporate elites, which could spawn a sea change in the Republican-controlled House and Senate on economic issues. Imagine for a moment the prospect of Sen. Bernie Sanders siding with his GOP colleagues on populist legislation dealing with an issue such as tax reform.
Trump’s narrow Electoral College victory, and Republican hopes for a repeat in 2020, center on the GOP’s ability to keep that group of economically challenged voters happy.
“More than anything, people are angry that the game appears to be rigged by corporate special interests,” said Greenberg, who coined the label “Reagan Democrats” after studying Macomb County, Mich., voters in 1985.
Trump’s defining issue, anti-trade and outsourcing, could further create a wedge between the new Trump GOP and corporate America.
The Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research firm, which works with Democratic candidates, posed a couple of questions to voters that were particularly revealing. They sought respondents’ views on trickle-down economics and CEOs of large companies.
They asked voters to express their feelings using a hypothetical thermometer, with a temperature of 100 as very warm and favorable and zero as very cold and unfavorable. A temp of 50, obviously, would be right in the middle, or neutral.
So, the reaction among white non-college men to trickle-down policies was chilly – 36 percent expressing unfavorable views compared to 27 percent favorable. Among white non-college women, the numbers were more lopsided, 38 percent cold, and just 11 percent warm.
As for corporate CEOs, they received a frosty reaction in the poll. Non-college men were at 47-19 percent unfavorable; non-college women were nearly identical in their thinking, 46-16 percent. What’s more, in both demographic categories 34 percent registered as very cool — zero to 25 — in their assessment of the corporate elite. That matched the response from Clinton voters overall.
Those aren’t Sanders-style statistics, but they are certainly a long way from the Romney coalition of 2012. As the Vermont senator has lamented, the working class favored Trump’s populist message by huge margins.
Nate Cohn, elections analyst for the New York Times blog, “The Upshot,” adds another wrinkle to the shifting pieces of the pie within the American electorate. Cohn said that last week’s exit polls dramatically demonstrated that, in the suburbs, many well-educated, white-collar white voters are now solidly in the Democratic camp. At the same time, blue-collar suburbanites, including many who voted for President Obama in 2012, have shifted to Trump and the Republicans.
Here’s how Cohn explained it:
Clinton made huge gains in the enclaves of the liberal elite, places like Boston, Seattle, Washington, D.C., where there’s a large professional class of lawyers or scientists or professors. But she just did not make similar gains in middle-class suburbs, like Long Island or around Tampa, Fla.
I think that people are broadly aware of the split between the white middle class and the professional class/wealthier suburbs. Say, the difference between Philadelphia’s Main Line and Levittown in Bucks County. Or between Westchester County and Staten Island. Or Oakland County/Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and Macomb County, Mich.
But this gap was a lot more salient in this presidential election than in a lot of recent contests.
It’s been trending this way for a while, but this was a pretty stark split. And that’s a big part of why Clinton’s gains among well-educated whites didn’t pay off as much in the battleground states, even as she ran up the score in coastal states like Washington State, California and Massachusetts.
Graph: Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research