The Daily - The Trump Voters We Don't Talk About

Episode Date: August 10, 2018

New data is challenging the popular portrait of Trump voters, and shedding light on why those who generally aren’t talked about may determine the outcome of the midterm elections. Guest: Nate Cohn, a domestic correspondent for The Upshot at The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, new data is challenging the popular portrait of the Trump voter and revealing why it's the Trump voter we don't talk about who may determine the outcome of the midterms. It's Friday, August 10th. Nate Cohn, tell us about this poll and why you're interested in it. It's a pretty novel survey. So most polls, you call a thousand people, you're done with them.

Pew instead has recruited several thousand people to take their polls every month. And so what they did was they asked people in November 2016, did you vote for the president and how do you feel about him? Then they went a step further. They went and matched their panelists to official voter records that indicate whether someone voted or not. Now flash forward to 2018, they went back to those same people and asked, how do you feel about the president today? So you have a great picture. You both have a really good account of how people felt in 2016, and we can ask the same people how they feel about the president today. So most polls just go pick up a group of people, like a thousand people, ask them a question and kind of discard them. And then the next poll asks a different group of

people and so on and so on. This poll has been kind of more faithful to the same group of people. Yeah. And that's nice because you know that changes you see in the poll are because of people changing their minds, not changes in who you're asking. I think it's the best account we have of who voted for the president and how they feel about the president today. Of all the polls out there. Of all the polls out there. I think this is the best we got.

And it may be the best we ever get. So before you tell us who the Trump voter actually is, according to this Pew report, give us a picture of who we tend to think the Trump voter is. In the race to the White House, white male voters, traditionally those in rural areas, the base of the Democratic Party, are in play. Hillary Clinton has not yet been able to get them. But is that changing? The American white working class makes up the core of Donald Trump's support,

but what's driving their decision to support him over Hillary Clinton? I think the stereotype is of a white male without a college degree who is so loyal to the president that he would back him no matter what he said or did. Let me turn it around and ask you. That definitely is my perception. Yeah. So what proportion of Trump's voters do you think are white men without a college degree? I would estimate 50%. Okay. The Pew data says it is 33%. So that means that two-thirds of Trump supporters defy that stereotype in at least one respect.

They're either a woman, they have a college degree, or they're non-white. So just 33% of the people who voted for Trump in 2016 are white men without a college degree. That's right. So I'm wrong. I mean, I'm pretty generous grader, but I think 50 is far enough that you're wrong. Okay. Yeah. So how do you think that compares to past presidents then? Or past Republican nominees to be more specific? So it could be Mitt Romney, could be George W. Bush, John McCain, recent Republican nominees. So how many white male non-college educated voters backed all of those Republicans? Yeah, what share of their voters were white men without a degree? Okay, I'm going to guess, and I'm going to give you a little explanation for each one.

George W. Bush had a pretty significant appeal to Hispanic voters. So I'm going to guess he has a slightly lower percentage. So I'm going to guess 26 for George W. Bush. And I'm going to guess 30 for McCain. What about Mitt Romney? Romney? I'm going to go with 25. They're all around 30 to 35%. And the reason is that the country is getting better and better educated over time and more diverse. So even though Bush did better among Hispanic voters, there were fewer Hispanic voters back in 2004. So there's this weird cross-cutting pattern where the country is getting better educated, but the Republicans are losing ground among them. Republicans are losing ground among them.

So the Trump voter is, within just a few percentage points, pretty much the same as your standard Republican voter, is really what you're saying. Right. So where did we get this idea, Nate, that Trump's voters are mostly non-college-educated white men, or largely non-college-educated white men, who will stick with the president no matter what. It must have derived from somewhere. I think it comes from a very understandable focus on how Trump won the election. And the Pew data shows what we've

recognized for a long time, which is that Trump went over the top because he excelled among white voters without a degree, particularly in these Midwestern battleground states where the Electoral College was won and lost. And so when you try to figure out how Trump won, it makes sense to go and visit a steel town and go to the bar and talk to white working class voters there. The Pew data, for instance, says that Trump won white working class men by a 50-point margin, 70 to 23. Huge improvement for the Republicans over Mitt Romney's performance in 2012. But those voters aren't necessarily representative of all Trump voters. They may have been the voters

that got him over the top, but trying to understand the Trump phenomenon more broadly, more sociologically, or at least nationally, you wouldn't have focused so overwhelmingly on that one group. So it's absolutely correct

that President Trump did unusually well with white men without college degrees. It's just that that's not the whole story of how he did. It's not. So it seems like we've conflated this voter who put Trump over the edge in these battleground states in 2016,

the non-college-educated white man, with just the Trump voter more broadly. Right. And that's important because, as I mentioned, an important fast of this pupil is that it's also tracking loyalty and how people's support for the president has changed over time. And the pupil finds that, yeah, these white working class men actually are pretty likely to remain loyal to the president. Pew asked people to measure their support from the president on a scale from zero to 100, where 100 means you love the guy and zero means you hate him.

100, where 100 means you love the guy and zero means you hate him. And 89% of white men without a degree still rated him as a 75 or higher as of this year who voted for the president to be clear. 90% of them are basically guaranteed supporters. I think that's fair to say. But there are other elements of the Trump coalition that are not as loyal. The weakest link seems to be women with a college degree. So in this poll, 14% of the white college-educated women who said they voted for the president in November 2016 say they have a very cold impression of him today, less than a 25. In November 2016, when Pew first asked the poll, only 1% of college-educated women said that. So we have a group of people who we know voted for the president who clearly have soured on him since then. So that's fascinating. This group of voters that we know voted for the president who clearly have soured on him since then.

So that's fascinating. This group of voters that you're describing, white, college-educated women, we tend not to even think of them as Trump voters. And what you're saying is actually they were, but they're starting to turn on the president. Yeah. So 14% of the president's supporters were women with a college degree, according to Pew data. It's not a huge number, but for comparison, you know, 10% of voters nationally are Hispanic, and plenty of time is very understandably spent trying to understand that voting block. So 14% out of a whole national coalition is a big number. So Nate, we started off this conversation with you telling us that we don't really understand the Trump voter as well as we think we do. That our sense that it's just white

men without college degrees is not quite right at all. And in fact, it's a broader coalition that includes groups like white college-educated women. And now you're saying that it was that group that we tend to overthink about, white non-college-educated men, that remain the most loyal, and it's the group of voters

we tend not to think about at all who are the most vulnerable and are turning on him. Right. And that could be a big problem for the Republicans in the midterms. We'll be right back. We won with everything. We won with women. I love the women. We won with everything. We won with women. I love the women. We won with women. We won with men.

I'd rather win with women, to be honest, but that's it. You know, when those numbers came, how's it possible? Because I never heard I was going to win the women. I said, I think the women like me. My wife, the first lady, Melania, said, the women really like you. They do like me. And I like them. But I said, how did we win the women?

We won the women. Nate, what do we need to know about this group of voters who we tended not to think about at all when we thought about how Trump won in 2016? White women with college degrees. As we head into the midterms. In general, the Pew data suggests that this group of white college-educated women voted for Trump with more reservations than any of the other groups that supported him. So only 83% gave him a very warm or warm rating in November 2016. So I think it's reasonable to assume that their reservation at the president have largely been confirmed. Maybe these were Republican voters who knew they weren't going

to vote for Hillary Clinton because of all of her flaws, and they gave the president a chance. But I think it's fair to say that whatever concerned them or made them less likely to support the president two years ago has only been reinforced in the intervening two years. Do you identify as a feminist? Are you a feminist? No, I wouldn't say I'm a feminist. I mean, I think that would be maybe going too far. I'm for women, I'm for men, I'm for everyone. I think people have to go out, they have to go out and really do it,

and they have to win. And women are doing great, and I'm happy about that. Now, for the first time since Roe v. Wade, America has a pro-life president, a pro-life vice president, a pro-life House of Representatives, and 25 pro-life Republican state capitals. That is pretty good. That is pretty good. Wow. Donald Trump is also facing criticism over remarks he made to USA Today about the sexual harassment claims against Roger Ailes, who stepped down last month as head of Fox News.

In that interview with columnist Kirsten Powers, Trump reiterated his criticism of the women who came forward to complain about Ailes. He'd earlier said it was very sad forward to complain about Ailes. He'd earlier said it was very sad that women were accusing Ailes. But Powers then asked Trump what he would do if his daughter Ivanka was treated the same way Ailes' alleged victims were treated. Trump replied, I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case. So something has happened through his presidency, how he's governed, that has turned reservations into dislike, and they are a group that just may vote against him or the party in just a couple months. Right. And how could that make a difference

in the midterm elections? I think it could make a big difference. The midterm election is not like a presidential election. Presidential election comes down to the closest states. And for a bunch of reasons, it turns out that the closest states were disproportionately white and working class in 2016. That's the president's biggest strength. So the president's big strength could really pay off in the states where it counted, like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio. You know them. High concentrations of white men. In all those states, white without a degree were a majority of the electorate.

Okay. 2018, it's going to come down to close districts. The closest districts in our country are mainly in the suburbs. And they're pretty well educated. And many of them didn't vote for the president. Those are going to be districts where the president's weaknesses are much more important. And the president's strengths don't go as far. So the voters that this poll shows were most loyal to the president in 2016 and made the

difference for him in that election are not all that important and present in these midterm districts. Right. They're less numerous in the battleground districts than they were in the battleground states. And then there's also a little additional twist, which is that historically, white working class voters are less likely to vote in midterm elections. Why? In general, just less educated voters are less likely to turn out in lower information elections. Which is to say midterms.

Yeah. And the voters that were the least loyal to President Trump, college educated women, for example, are very important in these midterm districts. Right. And they also appear particularly energized. In politics, they call this tight as a tick. Take a look at these results last night in Ohio's 12th district. This is a special election. It's also heavily suburban. Very highly educated, highest educated district in the entire state of Ohio.

In the special election we had in Ohio earlier this week, you know, I know the Democrat fell a little short, but the turnout in the well-educated suburbs of Columbus was huge and dwarfed the turnout in rural white working class Trump areas. That's why the race in a district so conservative was close. So that's interesting. This race that we focused on so much, the Ohio special election, is kind of a test case for what happens when the Trump voter we think about the most is not that present, doesn't show up. And the Trump voter we don't think about that much is very present and does show up. Yeah, and now suddenly you have a district that Republicans have always won comfortably, still too close to call two or three days after the election.

I wonder if this kind of perception issue we've been talking about, the disproportionate focus on the non-college-educated male voter, if that's also a mistake that the president and the Republican Party has made, and if they have governed and politicked in a way that centers on this same perception that you have kind of just burst. And if in doing so, they have alienated this voter that you're now saying is going to be so essential in the midterms. I think that's quite possible.

I think that you can easily imagine a slightly different version of this presidency that isn't 100% focused on reinforcing the base that tries to assuage some of the concerns of the voters at the periphery of his coalition, that would be much better positioned heading into the midterm elections. I mean, the economy right now is not that bad. The president should have higher approval ratings than this, right? And so to me, that indicates that the strategy that the president and other Republicans have pursued over the last two years

has, you know, been a suboptimal one. By the way, this is like, it's a pretty common problem recently, I think, in American politics. What do you mean? Take Obama in 2012. You know, when he won, there was so much focus on the Obama coalition, young voters, non-white voters, Hispanic voters. What did Obama do on that basis? The first big push they did was immigration reform, you might remember. What I can guarantee is that we will have in the first year an immigration bill that I strongly support and that I'm promoting and that I want to move that forward as quickly as possible. You might even remember that Sean Hannity briefly said he supported immigration reform because the Republicans did so poorly among Hispanic voters. And both the

Republican establishment's decision to focus on those voters and the Democratic Party's decision to focus on those voters, it opened up the door to the Trump campaign in a lot of ways because a big chunk of voters supported President Obama in 2012, white working-class voters who weren't part of that narrative, who the Republican establishment wasn't trying to win, who the Democrats didn't think they needed to win, and now suddenly there's a big opening for someone to move in and appeal to them. In other words, the Trump phenomenon is built around both parties focusing too much on the

group of voters who pushed someone over the edge. And then they tend to keep focusing on them in a way that leaves a whole other group of voters feeling left out who can then turn on that candidate. Yeah, I think a lot of people took for granted the idea that Democrats were just going to win white working class voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio and Iowa and wherever because they had for a long time and had for, in some cases, the whole last century. And if the lesson is that by and large, the Trump voter is the same as the Bush voter

and the same as the Romney voter and the McCain voter, and historically a Republican Party weakness has been college-educated women. It actually seems kind of obvious in retrospect that to alienate that group even further, as it seems President Trump has done, would be a meaningful problem for the party. Yeah. I mean, this is a diverse country. White voters without a degree today are 46% of eligible voters. So if you want to build a winning coalition on that group,

you're going to fall a little short. And by the way, the president won 46% of the popular vote. It happens to be a coincidence. It's not like as we've established, all of us voters were whites without a degree. But it is to say that, you know, if you want to have a sustainable coalition in American politics, it has to be broad

and it can't only be focused on pleasing one group. Nate, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the government of Puerto Rico quietly acknowledged for the first time

that more than 1,400 people died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, a figure 20 times higher than its official death toll from the storm. For months, Puerto Rico insisted that just 64 people died from the hurricane, which struck the island on September 20th. people died from the hurricane, which struck the island on September 20th. But in a report posted online Thursday, the government wrote, quote, although the official death count from the Puerto Rico Department of Public Safety was initially 64, the toll appears to be much higher. And in a ceremony in Lower Manhattan on Thursday, the parents of First Lady Melania Trump became U.S. citizens, completing a years-long journey that began when the First Lady sponsored them for family-based migration from Slovenia. And is this what's known as chain migration?

I suppose. In an interview with Times reporter Annie Correal, a lawyer for the first lady's parents acknowledged that the couple had relied on a system, sometimes called chain migration, that their son-in-law, President Trump, says he wants to eliminate. In the description, it stands for a bedrock of our immigration process when it comes to family reunification. Immediate relatives have the privilege of joining those so that you have somebody who works and lives more comfortably

with those they love around them. The Daily is produced by Theo Malcolm, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Ike Streis-Conracha, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowan, Michael Simon-Johnson, and Jessica Chung, with editing help from Larissa Anderson.

Lisa Tobin is our executive producer. Samantha Hennig is our editorial director. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher. Our engineer is Chris Wood. And our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolmett, Michaela Bouchard,

Lehman Gistu, Stella Tan, and Jamie Swanson. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.