Oh, this can’t be good news for the Cathedral. In the NYT, Nate Cohn has a piece on “Donald Trump’s Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat“:
[Trump’s] very best voters are self-identified Republicans who nonetheless are registered as Democrats. It’s a coalition that’s concentrated in the South, Appalachia and the industrial North, according to data provided to The Upshot by Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm.
That’s the short version. The longer, finger-wagging version adds:
But it is just as big a challenge for the Republican Party, which has maintained its competitiveness in spite of losses among nonwhite and young voters by adding older and white voters, many from the South. These gains have helped the party retake the House, the Senate and many state governments. But these same voters may now be making it harder for the party to broaden its appeal to nonwhite and younger people — perhaps even by helping to nominate Mr. Trump.
But, then, amidst this Trumpenfuhrer meme, there’s this:
Perhaps above all else, the data shows that Mr. Trump has broad support, spanning all major demographic groups. He leads among Republican women and among people in well-educated and affluent areas. He even holds a nominal lead among Republican respondents that Civis estimated are Hispanic, based on their names and where they live.
Ummm, I thought Trump was just a ‘white person’ phenomenon? Quick! Provide some hastily assembled correlations to prove the point that only White Racists™ like The Donald:
But it is still a familiar pattern. It is similar to a map of the tendency toward racism by region, according to measures like the prevalence of Google searches for racial slurs and racist jokes, or scores on implicit association tests.
“This type of animus towards African-Americans is far more common than just about anyone would have guessed,” said Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, the economist who first used Google search data to measure racial animus and argued that Barack Obama lost four percentage points in 2008 because of racial animus (a number I have argued is too high). He is now a contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times.
Racially charged searches take place everywhere — they are about as common as searches for “The Daily Show” or the Los Angeles Lakers. But they are more common in some parts of the country than others.
Sure, racially charged searches take place everywhere. And, sure, the White Racists™ that comprise the GOP elevated Ben Carson (and, some years back, Herman Cain) to top-tier nominee status, but that was weeks ago!
Furthermore, sophisticated people realize there is never implicitly (or overtly) anti-white ‘comedy’ on productions like The Daily Show.
I wonder, how is ‘racially charged’ searches defined? Is my searching of, say, “Black Lives Matter anti-white” considered such? What about a more general search for “American Renaissance” and the embedded, sub-linked material therein?
That Mr. Trump’s support is strong in similar areas does not prove that most or even many of his supporters are motivated by racial animus. But it is consistent with the possibility that at least some are. The same areas where racial animus is highest in the Google data also tend to have older and less educated people, and Mr. Trump tends to fare better among those groups — though the effect of Google data remains just as strong after controlling for these other factors.
Wow, so all of that to conclude that “some” of Trump’s supporters are motivated by racial animus. How hard would it be for me to selectively correlate ‘anti-white’ searches with proclivity for voting Democrat? Better yet, how about selectively correlating black ghetto voters with proclivity for voting Democrat? Given that blacks, as a whole, vote 95% Democrat, I’d say it wouldn’t be hard. And I will have proven that ‘some’ of HC’s supporters are motivated by racial animus.
In terms of a DT/HC contest, there’s these chunks of good news, which talk about areas of the country where Dems swing GOP during POTUS elections or that otherwise are swinging GOP in general:
These areas also include many of the places where Democrats have lost the most ground over the last half-century, and where Hillary Clinton tended to fare best among white voters in her contest against Mr. Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries.
In many of these areas, a large number of traditionally Democratic voters have long supported Republicans in presidential elections. Even now, Democrats have more registered voters than Republicans do in states like West Virginia and Kentucky, which have been easily carried by Republicans in every presidential contest of this century. As recently as a few years ago, Democrats still had a big advantage in partisan self-identification in the same states.
But during the Obama era, many of these voters have abandoned the Democrats. Many Democrats may now even identify as Republicans, or as independents who lean Republican, when asked by pollsters — a choice that means they’re included in a national Republican primary survey, whether they remain registered as Democrats or not.
Mr. Trump appears to hold his greatest strength among people like these — registered Democrats who identify as Republican leaners — with 43 percent of their support, according to the Civis data. Similarly, many of Mr. Trump’s best states are those with a long tradition of Democrats who vote Republican in presidential elections, like West Virginia.
Cohn ends his piece with the obligatory “the GOP must not become the White Racist™ Party” meme:
It has been argued that Mr. Trump’s divisive language may make it harder for the party to broaden its appeal. But the G.O.P.’s increasing reliance on older and less educated white voters, often from the South, made this challenging long before Mr. Trump mounted a campaign. Over the long run, the party will need to figure out a way to satisfy its newest converts while maintaining a message that’s appealing to the rest of the country.
