Donald Trump is managing to do the impossible—turn the one demographic he has always counted on against him. In fact, his candidacy was built around the notion that he would inspire so many white men to the polls that he could more than overcome his deficit with other demographics. But if things keep going in the direction they’re heading, Trump could ultimately perform worse than previous GOP candidates among the very group that was supposedly his silver bullet. Jeremy Peters writes:
Surveys of voters nationwide and in battleground states conducted over the last two weeks showed that Mr. Trump was even with or below where Mitt Romney, the Republican Party nominee four years ago, was with white men when he won that demographic by an overwhelming 27 percentage points.
For Mr. Trump, who has staked much of his legitimacy as a candidate on his strength in the polls, the numbers are a dose of cold, dangerous math. If he does not perform any better than Mr. Romney did with white men, he will almost certainly be unable to rally the millions of disaffected white voters he says will propel him to the White House. [...]
“If you set out to design a strategy to produce the lowest popular vote possible in the new American electorate of 2016, you would be hard-pressed to do a better job than Donald Trump has,” said Whit Ayres, a pollster who has advised Republican presidential and Senate candidates for more than 25 years. “This is an electoral disaster waiting to happen.”
Best news all week! Trump is weakest among college-educated white men, where he’s drawing less than half the support that Romney enjoyed among the group. In the article, one GOP voter said that faced with the choice between Trump and Clinton, he would likely stay home. That’s the best of all possible worlds for Democrats, since it would give a significant boost to down-ticket candidates. It seems possible that Trump might still make history, but in a way he didn’t expect—suppressing the vote to historic lows. A girl can dream.