Monday, September 5, 2016

Is Donald Trump Losing Suburban Voters?

I don't think so, although I haven't seen hard data.

Urban areas, especially in minority and college towns, are going to run to the far-left.

You'd think Trump would be winning the suburbs hands down. Or maybe he's got the ex-urbs nailed down, heh.

From Cathleen Decker, at LAT, "In Pennsylvania and nationally, Trump's problems with suburban voters blunt his ascent":
Marie Jeffries has a very firm view of Donald Trump, and she says it won’t change in the nine weeks before election day.

“He’s a wild man. I think he might put us into a war,” said Jeffries, who was among hundreds sauntering down Main Street in this southeastern Pennsylvania town on the balmy evening that opened Labor Day weekend.

She once was intrigued by Trump, she said, but “then he started the shenanigans, and opened his trap.”

“He’s a bully,” she said. “We’re trying to get away from it in schools. Why have a bully as president?”

Her views matter. Jeffries is a 66-year-old woman who lives in the suburbs, in her case Philadelphia’s. Right now, voters like her stand to cost Trump the presidential contests in key battleground states, starting with Pennsylvania.

Trump is caught in a powerful vise of his own making, between those who find him offensive, like Jeffries, and those who find him entrancing. The things he does and says that appeal to that latter group, which is dominated by white men, often alienate the suburban voters, particularly women, he needs if he is to broaden his base enough to win.

Mark Shimp is one of those Trump voters. He owns a plumbing company in Newtown, Pa., and calls Hillary Clinton “terrible”—the only printable description he can offer, he says.

“If there is a definition in the dictionary of what is wrong in politics, Hillary Clinton is it,” he said, standing on his front porch, a Trump campaign sign on the lawn and American and Marine Corps flags flying from a pole nearby.

“How does she feel the pain of the middle class?”

In broad strokes, Trump and Clinton supporters are seldom near each other in much of the country. The Republican dominates rural, white America; the Democrat overwhelmingly wins the cities with their higher minority populations. But in this slice of Pennsylvania north and west of Philadelphia, where the suburbs meet the exurbs, the two sides collide.

Already, the campaign has left many voters wary...
Actually, that's a pretty good analysis. I'm convinced it's going to come down to voter turnout among all those Trump supporters in flyover country. I mean it. They've seriously got to put a dent in those turnout numbers if the Manhattan mogul's going to have a chance in the battlegrounds like the Keystone State.

Still more at that top link.

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