They dragged him to the White House. And without their great support, they will not defend their post in the fall. Yes, Donald Trump will continue to rely mainly on supporting white people with lower education this year – in 2016 they made up almost half of all voters and the current president won the vote from 64% of them. Hillary Clinton only lost 28% and lost because of this abysmal difference. Why did they vote for Trump and why do they plan to support him to a large extent this year as well?
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It sounds like a cliché, but one of the main causes was fear. Fear of a changing world, which is analyzed, for example, by an analysis of a magazine The Atlantic. The formerly dominant group of whites has been feeling threatened in recent years, and Donald Trump has offered them a solution – the good old days. These are hidden in his now well-known slogan: “Make America Great Again!”
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The white lower and middle working class simply found a president in Trump whom she thought would stand up for her.
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And which, for example, can stop the relocation of production abroad and thus save jobs in industrial areas. The economic authority of the current president has managed to withstand a pandemic and an unprecedented economic downturn. According to the survey, it has the issue of economic recovery YouGov more support than his opponent Joe Biden.
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But even confidence in Donald Trump’s economic policy did not prevent the outflow of much of the white working class toward Biden. While beating Clinton by 36 percentage points in this constituency, Biden loses “only” twenty.
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However, according to surveys, Trump loses with Biden in practically all other sociodemographic groups. And in some even overwhelming.
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Important microscopic changes
The Democratic candidate leads Trump so much that he defeats the current president with other Republican voters, such as the elderly. Traditionally, in the United States, the younger a person is, the more they elect Democrats. And the older he gets, the more he votes for Republicans. This was exactly the case in 2016 – Trump won in the older and Clinton won in the younger.
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This year, however, Joe Biden is leading in all age groups. In the youngest years, it has an overwhelming advantage, by about 30 percentage points. For voters over the age of 65, it is just one to two percent ahead. If Biden maintained this lead in the election, he would be the first Democratic candidate from Al Gore to win the senior. Barack Obama didn’t make it either.
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But Biden can also rely on traditional democratic voters. According to several polls, he would now get about 85% of black votes – while Trump would have less than a tenth. However, it should be emphasized that blacks make up only 11% of all votes. But Biden also leads in Latinos, by 40 percentage points. But they also represent only every tenth vote cast. Interestingly, the current racial unrest with the electoral support of minorities probably did not move at all. Both presidential candidates have almost the same minority support as they had before George Floyd’s death.
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The most surprising is Biden’s success with whites. Biden made up for the aforementioned twenty percent loss from white people without a university degree to the more educated. It leads by an overwhelming 28 percentage points. For whites, the presidential election looks like a draw. Compared to 2016, however, it is a big gain for the Democrats. Clinton lost to Trump in the whites by 16 percentage points, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012 by as much as 20 percentage points.
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The Biden are also recording the demographic changes that have taken place in the USA in the last four years. All traditional democratic sociodemographic groups have grown: white people with a university degree, blacks, Latinos. And the Republican single, but giant group, shrunk by two percentage points. You guessed it right, they are already known to us white people without a university degree.
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At first glance, these can only be microscopic changes. It seems that it doesn’t matter if the number of black votes is eleven or twelve percent. But that is not entirely true. In 2016, over 145 million votes were cast. And the election was decided by less than a hundred thousand votes in three states. Even small changes in the demographic composition of voters can thus affect the final result of the entire election.
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Biden is recording these changes, and he will be in a slightly easier position than previous Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Thanks to that, however, he can win for democrats states that his fellow party did not even dream of.
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Democratic coast, republican hinterland
The electoral system in the United States is so specific that in some countries it is not even necessary to vote – we know in advance who will win in them. The core of Joe Biden’s support lies mainly on both banks of the continent. On the Western side, the Democratic candidate can count on the profits of the states of Washington, Oregon and the most populous state of the USA, California. Of course, this does not mean that all voters in these states will vote for Biden. However, their demographic composition is so specific that Trump has not the slightest chance of winning. The situation is similar on the East Coast, for example in the states of Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. Biden can thus be sure of winning up to 170 voters.
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But even Donald Trump can rely on a package of states, where he will win without a campaign. The Republican Belt stretches across the United States from west to southeast – from Idaho to Alabama. In total, he has de facto certain over 100 voters, a little less than his opponent. However, the winning candidate must win at least 270 voters, so Trump and Biden still lack many.
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The battle for the remaining voters will take place in the south and in the Great Lakes region. Joe Biden has a big advantage at the moment. In virtually all so-called battleground states (ie states with uncertain results), it leads in surveys, often by a double-digit difference. About 55% of voters in these states refuse to consider a vote for Trump at all. And that is a big problem for the current president. In the key states of 2016 (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin), he won 48% of the vote in the election, and in all three it was enough to win a narrow tenth of a percent. Now it looks like he can get in them maximum 45%. With such a result, he would have only a minimal chance of winning.
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In addition, Biden managed to turn some Republican strongholds into new undecided states – such as Texas. Clinton lost 9 percentage points, Obama 12 and 16 percentage points, respectively. How’s Biden? According to the latest Fox News survey leads in Texas by one percentage point.
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Trump is thus gradually losing all the benefits that previous Republican candidates had. At the same time, it deepens traditional republican weaknesses. Unless he changes his policies, behavior and election campaign, he will continue to lose in November. If he loses Texas, the loss will be overwhelming.
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