Trump’s Ceiling
By Nayyer Ali MD
While the world has turned upside down this year with a global pandemic and economic depression, one thing that seems to be constant is President Trump’s base of support. With unemployment soaring to levels not seen since the early 1930’s, and likely to rise over 20% this month, a sitting President would normally be in political freefall. But Trump’s approval rating remains stable around 43-45%, depending on the pollster, and the White House and the Republican Party still feel they are going to win the November election.
Why hasn’t Trump suffered? In February he claimed the virus, which had caused 15 cases, would go away, “like a miracle”. Instead we have over 1 million infections and officially at least 80,000 dead, with another 2,000 dying daily on average. These are undercounts, the actual number of infected is likely 10 million, and deaths are well over 100,000, but those numbers will not be known till better testing and full epidemiological data are available later this year. What is holding Trump up is his rock-solid base of support in the GOP. His voters still have not abandoned him, and his grip on them appears almost unshakeable. But the converse is also true. Trump has made no effort to reach out and broaden his coalition of support. Given the rather fixed nature of who is for or against Trump, we can better understand what his prospects in November will be.
The voting public can be thought of as three large groups. Whites without a college degree are the largest group, they accounted for 43% of all voters in 2016. Whites with college degrees made up 30% of voters. Minorities accounted for 27% of voters in 2016, with 12% Black, 9% Hispanic, and 6% Asian or other races. Trump’s support base is primarily Whites without a college degree (he famously once said at a rally that he “loves the poorly educated”). Trump in 2016 won 63% of these voters, but only 43% of Whites with college. He won 8% of Blacks, 29% of Hispanics, and 36% of Asians.
In the 2018 midterms, the GOP basically followed this pattern. Exit polls showed 60% of Whites without college voted GOP, while only 45% of Whites with college, 10% of Blacks, 20% of Asians, and 30% of Hispanics did.
But the nation’s demographics continue to shift every year. In 2020, Whites without college will make up 41% of voters, down more than 2%, while Hispanics and Asians will gain 1.3% and 0.6% share. If voters break in the same ratio for Trump in 2020 as they did in 2016, his share of the total vote will drop. Using the projected demographic shares for 2020 and the exit polls from 2018 a quick calculation projects Trump winning only 44.3% of the popular vote. This actually matches up quite well with his approval rating in current polling. Biden will not win the remaining 55.7% of the vote, but assuming 2% vote for a third party, that still leaves Biden with 53.7% of the popular vote, giving him a winning margin of over 9 points.
A 9-point win would be huge, the biggest winning margin since the Reagan landslide of 1984. Most Democrats are too shell-shocked from 2016 to think this is even possible. While Trump and his campaign team think they are going to win, many Democrats remain deeply worried despite what the polls say. I share these fears. What they are based on is the distribution of voters around the country. The big Democratic states are going to give massive popular vote wins to Biden. He might carry California by 5 million votes. But as we all know, what matters is the critical swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and Arizona. If Trump can hold on to at least five of them, he gets reelected. What makes that possible is that all these states have large numbers of Whites without college degrees, giving Trump a demographic boost in the critical states. In Florida and North Carolina, Democrats do even worse among White non-college voters than they do in the Midwest.
These demographics also applied in 2016, in fact, Trump was predicted to get about 46% of the popular vote, which is in fact what he actually got. This should have resulted in his defeat, as McCain only got 46% in 2008 and Romney got 47% in 2012, both were easily beaten by Obama. What pushed Trump over the top was that Clinton was unable to hold together the Democratic coalition. Instead of about 1-2% voting third party, 6% of voters in 2016 went for someone other than Trump or Clinton. In addition, Clinton suffered from a small but significant drop in Black voter turnout. This combined to hold Clinton to 48% of the popular vote, still a two-point win, but not enough margin to hold enough of the critical swing states. The loss of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, by a combined 77,000 votes, made Trump President. But the small demographic shift in the last four years in each of these states would be enough to give the Democrats the win, even if each group voted the same way it did in 2016.
Trump may in fact be in even deeper trouble besides the demographics. College educated Whites, particularly women, are moving further towards the Democratic party. Democratic voters are motivated and anxious, rather than complacent as they were in 2016. If Biden picks an African American woman as his Vice President, that should help boost critical Black voter turnout.
After 2016, no one is going to assume a Trump defeat. Somehow, he might find a way to win. But with the economy collapsing and with the pandemic still not under control and no obvious leadership coming from the White House, his odds are looking poorer.
If Trump does win in November, he will complete his takeover of the Republican party and will leave liberals wondering what happened to the Obama coalition of 2008. How could those same voters elect Donald Trump twice? But if Trump loses badly in November, it may force the long-awaited reckoning with the future that the Republicans have repeatedly avoided. A political party that loses every segment of society except Whites without college degrees, has no political future. That group is declining in size with every election. The GOP will have to completely reinvent itself if it wants to remain relevant in the 2020’s. It’s not clear that is even possible, as its core base rests on either racial resentment or Christian evangelicals opposed to abortion. If it sought to appeal to minorities, or if it gave up on its anti-abortion stance, it would lose its main voters. In the 1950’s the GOP was not opposed to civil rights, nor was it aligned with Christian evangelicals. It adopted both of those positions which gave it a dominant position in the southern states by the 1990’s, control of Congress in 1994, and control of the White House for 36 of the 50 years after 1968. This approach is now running up against a demographic dead-end. Trump escaped from it just barely in 2016, but his luck may run out this November.
