06-17-2016, 07:26 AM
(06-10-2016, 11:22 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(06-10-2016, 11:01 AM)playwrite Wrote: Nate Silver nips this latest Great White Hope in the butt -Granted I live in "Bubble-land," but none of the whites in my own social circle have expressed any affinity for Trump. In rough order, here are the actual affinities - Clinton, Sanders, Johnson.
Trump Isn’t Winning Enough White Voters
Quote:...One big reason Trump is trailing — by an average of 4 to 6 percentage points, depending on which aggregator you use — is because, despite all the bluster, he isn’t doing any better than Romney did among white voters. According to Cohn’s estimate, based on pre-election surveys, Romney beat President Obama by 17 percentage points among white voters. To win, Trump would need to improve on Romney’s margin by a minimum of 5 percentage points if the electorate looked exactly the same as it did in 2012 and every other racial group voted in the same manner as it did in 2012.
...Trump is winning white voters by an average of 17 percentage points, matching exactly Romney’s margin from four years ago. That’s not good enough, especially considering that the 2016 electorate will probably be more diverse than 2012’s. Trump probably needs to do even better than a 22-point lead among white voters, or he will have to pull in more minority voters than Romney did in order to win.
...And Trump is already doing far better than Romney among white voters without a college degree, as Cohn noted. But in politics, as in physics, every action has a reaction. As Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report has pointed out, Trump is also doing considerably worse than Romney among white voters with a college degree. That makes sense, given Trump’s direct appeals to whites who do not have a high level of education, and his penchant for shunning intellectuals.
Basically, it's the Great White Uneducated Hope.
Or, Trump's success really depends on how clueless the country has become.
Choose your side.
... which also suggests that he would do unusually badly outside the Mountain South, the area with the most white voters with low education. Thus he would win West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma quickly and with amazing numbers. On the other side, where white people are generally well educated, Donald Trump could be losing much ground. He has been tied with Hillary Clinton in Utah, which has high-quality education even if the state has typically been one of the strongest Republican states since 1952. The one poll that I have seen of Kansas, a state that has gone for only one Democratic nominee (LBJ in the 1964 blowout) has Donald Trump behind.
Those two states could be on-time, specific anomalies. Of course, Donald Trump might be a poor match for Mormon sensibilities, and the Kansas GOP could be facing some short-term rifts. Besides, the poll in Kansas is one pollster with a suspect reputation for accuracy.
The more educated that people are, the less vulnerable they are to demagoguery. The more likely they are to abhor political violence even supposedly on their side. They are more capable of critical thought that allows them to recognize contradictory statements that can have only absurd conclusions. Knowing that contradictory policies ensure that some people who get promises made to them will get the shaft. Maybe if one is an Insider and knows who (typically more helpless people with fewer connections) will get the shaft and that as an Insider one will get the boon, one might tolerate the dishonesty because one will get the boon at others' expense.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.