Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Here are the reasons Trump is losing so badly - Jennifer Rubin

The 15-point lead for former vice president Joe Biden in the Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday seemed to many Democrats too good to be true. Then a NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll dropped, showing an 11-point lead for Biden.

Even if you think the polls will narrow as the election gets closer (a good bet) or that President Trump will start acting like a normal president (a bad bet), it is instructive to see why Biden has these big margins and how they correlate with Trump’s increasingly bizarre antics and fractured rhetoric.

Trump has lost white women: In 2016, Hillary Clinton (according to later verified results) carried female voters by 15 points (54-39) but lost white women (45-47). In the Quinnipiac poll, Biden leads by a greater margin than Clinton’s final number among all women (59-31) and among white women (55-38).

In the NBC-WSJ poll, Biden’s lead is similarly large, at 58 percent to 35 percent (though numbers for white women are not specifically reported). It’s likely that Trump lost so much ground among white women due to a range of policies, from his treatment of women and children at the border to his incendiary language to his lack of concern for the health of schoolchildren returning in the fall.

Trump has lost older voters: Older voters (65 and above) went for Trump in 2016 by nine points. Quinnipiac shows Biden crushing Trump with these voters with a 14-point margin. (The NBC-WSJ poll does not break this group out either.) It was probably bad strategy to threaten to take away Medicaid (via elimination of the Affordable Care Act), which funds nursing home costs, and to be cavalier about older voters’ vulnerability during the pandemic.

Because these voters (like women) tend to turn out in greater numbers than other segments of the electorate, this is particularly bad news for Trump, especially in states with large numbers of seniors and surging coronavirus cases (e.g., Florida and Arizona).

Trump has lost ground with whites without college degrees: Trump did exceptionally well with this group in 2016, winning by 36 points (64-28). His advantage has deteriorated considerably, leading by just 13 points in the Quinnipiac poll and by 22 points in the NBC-WSJ poll. It may be that many of these voters are now suffering badly due to the economy, they resent him trying to take away health care or they are turned off by Trump’s racist appeals.

They may have voted for him because he would shake things up or because they disliked Clinton more or because they thought his skills as a businessman would serve him well. Whatever the explanation, that critical group is falling away from Trump, and hugging the Confederate flag and bullying schools to reopen is not helping.

Trump is bombing with independent and swing-state voters: These voters chose Trump in 2016 by a narrow 43-42 margin; Quinnipiac now shows him losing the group 34-51. In swing states, Trump is losing by an even larger margin than his overall national vote (12 points), according to the NBC-WSJ poll.

Of the 11 battleground states the NBC-WSJ poll surveyed (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), Trump won six in 2016. A 12-point overall deficit in these states suggests he will do much worse in 2020.

In sum, the price of appealing so heavily to his far-right, white, evangelical and mostly male base is that Trump has alienated everyone else.

Even within core groups, he is not doing as well as he did in 2016. Lo and behold, the NBC-WSJ poll found that 50 percent of all voters say there is no chance they’d vote for him, while 52 percent say they’d be "very uncomfortable.” Biden’s figures are both under 40 percent. If you cannot hold or expand your base and you enrage everyone else, chances are you will lose.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/16/here-are-reasons-trumps-losing-so-badly/