As comforting as it is for many on the left to dismiss all Trump voters as an undifferentiated mass of racist reactionaries who are for everything bad and against everything good, that is not true. Like all very large political groups, they contain multitudes.. Henry Olsen, one of the best conservative analysts around who plays it straight with the data, has a new poll of 2020 Trump voters which has some very interesting findings.
"[T]hese voters [are not] uniformly conservative. Seventy-one percent say they are conservative, but 26 percent say they are liberal or moderate. Significantly, more than 50 percent of the sizeable number of Trump voters who had voted for Barack Obama or a third-party candidate in 2012 say they are liberal or moderate. These voters are disproportionally blue-collar Whites and non-Whites, the same voters that Republican strategists say they need to prevail in the future. It seems that running as a “severe conservative” — as then-Gov. Mitt Romney described himself — may unite the GOP, but it also alienates crucial swing voters....
Forty-five percent agree...with the statement that “government should guarantee all people a minimum standard of living if they work to the best of their ability.” Sixty-three percent say Social Security benefits for future retirees should be kept at the same level as for current retirees, even if payroll taxes must be raised to finance it. Forty-five percent also say that it is more important to ensure “every senior citizen can get the health care they need regardless of the cost to the rest of us” than it is to control the cost of Medicare. Even the central tenet of supply-side economics, that cutting taxes on the rich helps grow the economy for everyone, finds support among only 54 percent of Trump voters. Any 2024 candidate who wants to run on the pre-Trump economic orthodoxy will turn off as many Trump voters as they turn on....
Even Trump himself divides his voters. Sixty-six percent of his supporters say they are more a supporter of him than the Republican Party, while 34 percent say otherwise. Fifty-four percent say they would definitely vote for him in the 2024 Republican primaries, but 20 percent would not support him, and 26 percent would only “probably” back him. These findings surely overstate his standing among the GOP more broadly, as a significant number of Republican voters either backed President Biden, voted for a third-party candidate or skipped the presidential race entirely. Trump starts in a strong position for the nomination, but he is nowhere near uniting his 2020 coalition, much less gaining support from voters who opposed him in November."
Very interesting. There are clearly chinks in the enemy's armor.....
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