Michigan was a bell weather state in this primary season: Trump won it and (to everyone’s surprise) Sanders won it, despite the latter being an astonishing 30 pts behind in the polls leading into election day.
Ohio is the next huge Rust Belt state to hold it’s primary next week. Mein Trumpf currently leads Kasich (in this, his home state) by 6 to 8 pts.
From Reuters:
If Donald Trump wins the Republican Party nomination, his path to the White House will run through this working-class city with a knack for picking presidents.
No Republican has ever won the White House without Ohio. And nowhere better reflects the challenges and opportunities Trump faces in his 2016 presidential quest than Canton, a once-booming industrial city that, like Ohio and the rest of America’s rust belt, is going through profound economic and demographic change…
A more immediate test looms next week in the state’s Republican primary, where polls show Trump narrowly leads Ohio Governor John Kasich, who casts himself as a pragmatic, statesman-like alternative to Trump. If Trump wins Ohio and Florida — states rich in the delegates who select their party’s nominee at July’s Republican National Convention – he would almost certainly lock up his party’s nomination…
The state, which has not voted for the loser in a presidential election since 1960, is seen as a microcosm of American swing voters — from culturally conservative “Reagan Democrats” who defected from their party to support Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to suburban soccer moms and upwardly mobile Hispanics.
To offset the growing proportion of blacks and Hispanics in the voting age population, Trump must turn white voters out in greater numbers than Romney in cities such as Canton. His performance in primary states where Democrats and independent can vote, as well as Republicans, suggests Trump could attract large numbers of these voters in a general election…
“The labor unions, who usually support the Democrats, a lot of our members, and a lot of their families, are supporting Trump,” said Keith Strobelt, a political director for the United Steelworkers local union in Canton. Strobelt does not support Trump.
That last paragraph is emblematic.
The political director of the Union (part of the ‘elite’) doesn’t like Trump, but his members (his base) does.
As the song goes:
Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
