"His strength
in states that represent different elements of the GOP coalition shows
his uniqueness as a candidate—and the challenge he presents for his
rivals."
"Even as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz escalate their attacks on Donald Trump,
next week’s cascade of Super Tuesday contests offers the GOP
front-runner a unique opportunity to simultaneously weaken, and perhaps
disable, his principal competitors on separate battlefields of a
two-front war.
On the other front, polls show Trump leading in mostly white-collar, far less evangelical states including Vermont, Massachusetts, and Virginia that should be crucial building blocks for Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Ohio Governor John Kasich, the candidates relying most on mainstream conservative voters.
Trump’s strength in states that represent such divergent poles of the GOP coalition testifies to his unique assets as a candidate—and the challenge he presents for his rivals. If Trump can beat Cruz next week in heavily blue-collar and evangelical states on one side, and top Kasich and Rubio in white collar, less culturally conservative states on the other, it will grow increasingly daunting for any candidate to coalesce a coalition large enough to stop the front-runner. That prospect may help explain the urgency with which Rubio and Cruz assailed Trump at Thursday night’s debate.
“In Trump you’ve got a candidate who appears to be able to take on Cruz among Cruz’ strength voters, who are evangelicals and also to take on Kasich and Marco among more mainstream voters,” says Neil Newhouse, the chief pollster in 2012 for Mitt Romney. “That is going to make him tough to beat.”
John Brabender, the chief strategist for Rick Santorum’s campaign in 2012, adds:
“It speaks to the complexity of Donald Trump. I saw a poll out today, which had him leading in Texas, one leading in Florida, and one leading in Massachusetts. There’s an absurdity in that. You should not have a presidential candidate leading in all three of those states because the voting universes are so different.”
With that profile, Trump is poised to bridge a geographic and demographic divide that stymied the party’s past two presidential nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney. The 11 states allocating delegates this year on Super Tuesday did not vote at the same time in 2012 or 2008. But in 2012, Romney won the mostly white-collar states voting next week on Super Tuesday (Vermont, Massachusetts, and Virginia) while losing most of the heavily evangelical Southern states (Alabama, Oklahoma, and Tennessee) to Rick Santorum, and Georgia to Newt Gingrich. (Romney carried Arkansas and Texas, which voted only after he had effectively clinched the nomination). In 2008, John McCain and Romney split the white-collar states voting next Tuesday while Mike Huckabee captured Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Georgia across the South.
This clear geographic divide reflected the demographic patterns of allegiance that drove the 2008 and 2012 races. Both McCain and Romney ran better among voters who were more centrist, and were not evangelicals. Each man followed a remarkably similar formula for victory: both carried about half of voters who were not evangelicals and about one-third of those who were, according to cumulative analyses of all the 2008 and 2012 exit polls conducted by the ABC pollster Gary Langer. As a result, both McCain and Romney ran well in states with few evangelicals, but struggled in those with more.
Trump has replaced these historic fissures with a new divide based on education. Particularly over the past three contests, Trump has established a dominant advantage among Republicans without a college degree:"...
[Ed. note: "70% of Americans don't have college degree, Rick Santorum says," Politifact, Katharina Fiedler, 4/18/2015. "We rate his claim True." What if they all voted?]
(continuing): "Exit polls showed that compared to his next closet rival, white voters without a four-year college degree preferred him by a margin of 29 percentage points in New Hampshire, 18 points in South Carolina and 29 points in Nevada. Trump hasn’t run as well among white college-educated voters, but no one has consolidated nearly as much support among that group as Trump has coalesced among what he called in his Nevada victory speech “the poorly educated.”"...
[Ed. note: Again, 70% of Americans don't have college degrees. Trump's Nevada victory speech acknowledged several groups: "So this was very exciting tonight....So we won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated." (parag. 8)...]
(continuing): "Trump’s strength among non-college voters—particularly blue-collar evangelicals—keys the threat he poses to Cruz in the South. In five of the Southern states voting on Tuesday, white evangelicals comprised at least 60 percent of the vote in the most recent GOP presidential primary for which exit polls are available, and blue-collar voters represented at least half the vote.
These include Arkansas (75 percent white evangelical and 58 percent non-college); Alabama (75 percent evangelical and 56 percent non-college); Tennessee (73 percent evangelical and 54 percent non-college); Oklahoma (72 percent evangelical and 55 percent non-college) and Texas (60 percent evangelical and 50 percent non-college).
Cruz faces dire prospects in all of these places, with the likely exception of his home state, if he can’t reverse Trump’s inroads among evangelicals, particularly those without a college degree. In most of these states, those blue-collar evangelicals figure to be the single-largest voting block. And they have moved steadily toward Trump since the GOP contest began.
From the other direction, Cruz has faced mounting competition for college-educated evangelicals.
After winning those white-collar evangelicals in Iowa and New Hampshire, Cruz lost them narrowly to Rubio in South Carolina and to Trump in Nevada, according to the CNN figures.
Completing the picture is Cruz’s systemic weakness among voters who are not evangelicals: Those non-evangelical voters preferred Trump over Cruz by 11 percentage points in Iowa, 30 in New Hampshire, 17 in South Carolina, and 32 in Nevada.
Most polls show Cruz leading in his home state of Texas: A Monmouth University poll released this week gave him a double-digit advantage overall and a comfortable lead among evangelicals with and without a college degree there. But if Cruz on Tuesday can’t beat Trump in the other heavily evangelical Southern and border states that Huckabee and Santorum mostly carried, the Texan will instantly face difficult questions about where he can win as the calendar turns toward Northern states with fewer born-again voters. “If he loses the South and barely squeaks by in Texas it’s going to be very difficult for him to continue on because those other states don’t set up well for him at all,” says Hogan Gidley, the communications director for Huckabee’s campaign this year.
Compared to Cruz, the Super Tuesday stakes aren’t quite as high for Rubio and Kasich because more of the states where they can realistically hope to compete (primarily along the coasts and in the upper Midwest) vote later on. But it would be an extremely ominous signal for both if they can’t dent Trump in the white-collar states that mostly preferred McCain and Romney."...
"Romney is scrambling to reverse the polls that show Obama ahead....But he's having mixed success with his chief target: white, working-class voters who are socially conservative often have union backgrounds. A generation ago they were called "Reagan Democrats."...No Republican has won the White House without carrying it....He is having trouble connecting with middle-class Ohioans....
Yet the very limited public polling available in Vermont—conducted before Trump’s South Carolina and Nevada victories—placed the New Yorker comfortably ahead there. A Monmouth University poll in Virginia released Thursday showed Trump drawing 41 percent, as much as Rubio (27 percent) and Cruz (14 percent) combined; Kasich lagged badly at just 7 percent. The survey found Trump leading among both evangelicals and non-evangelicals-with an even wider advantage among the former than the latter. Among voters without a college degree, Trump drew a commanding 47 percent; his showing wasn’t as dominant among college-educated voters (37 percent), but even there he comfortably led Rubio (at 27 percent).
Likewise, a poll released Friday morning by WBUR public radio in Boston showed Trump romping in Massachusetts, with 40 percent of the vote, slightly more than Rubio (19 percent) and Kasich (19 percent) combined. In an increasingly familiar pattern, the survey showed Trump attracting 54 percent of voters without a college degree, nearly four times the showing for Rubio, his closest competitor. Trump attracts a much more modest 30 percent among voters with a four-year degree or more but leads with them because Kasich (24 percent) and Rubio (23 percent) splinter the rest.
These states could expose, in particular, the limits confronting Rubio. On Thursday he turned in by far his most spirited debate performance—but so far he has demonstrated an appeal that is broad, but shallow. In particular, these white-collar states underscore Rubio’s inability to truly consolidate the college-educated voters who have long expressed the most skepticism about Trump’s policy agenda and temperament. In many states, both McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012 amassed dominating numbers among college-educated voters who were not evangelicals: Romney, for instance, carried over half of those voters in Michigan, Illinois, and Florida, and between 42 and 48 percent in New Hampshire, Georgia, and Ohio.
In particular, Rubio faces competition for those upscale voters, particularly in Democratic-leaning states, from Kasich, who has offered a much more moderate message. “It’s reasonable to conclude that Kasich and Rubio would both do significantly better among that group if the other one were not around,” says Steve Koczela, the president of MassINC Polling Group, which conducted the WBUR poll of Massachusetts.
Of the remaining Super Tuesday states that will award delegates, the Alaska caucus has drawn little attention, but previously has rewarded mainstream candidates: Romney won it in both 2008 and 2012. Minnesota is something of a puzzle. It is a well-educated state with relatively few evangelicals in the overall population (fewer than one-in-five). But conservative Christians have played an outsized role in its caucuses before: Santorum won them in 2012 after Romney carried them in 2008.
Maybe the most interesting state of all is Georgia, the sole contest on the Super Tuesday docket that features a majority of both white evangelical (64 percent) and college-educated voters (52 percent). In 2012, it broke decisively for favorite son Newt Gingrich. But in 2008, that precarious balance produced a three-way pileup in which Huckabee (who won mostly behind heavy support from blue-collar evangelicals), McCain and Romney all finished within four points of each other.
In both 2008 and 2012, evangelicals without a college degree comprised the largest single block of Georgia voters (just over one-third in 2012), followed by evangelicals with a college degree (just under one-third), college-educated non-evangelicals (about one-fifth) and non-college non-evangelicals (just over one-tenth). On paper, that should offer a foundation for all of the major candidates to compete there. In practice, all of the polls released in Georgia since South Carolina have shown Trump with a double-digit lead, and Rubio and Cruz, somewhere in his rear-view mirror, clawing each other in a distant battle for second-place."
====================
We've had some great numbers coming out of Texas, and amazing numbers coming out of Tennessee and Georgia and Arkansas and then in a couple of weeks later Florida. We love Florida so. We're going to do very well in Ohio. We're beating the governor. It's always nice to be beating the governor.
And Michigan — the whole thing. It's going to be an amazing two months. We might not even need the two months, folks, to be honest.
So I want to begin by thanking my boys, Eric has been all over the place making speeches. He's getting better than me so I'm a little jealous. And Don … you were all over, right? He loves the rifle stuff. This is serious rifle. This is serious NRA, both of them, both of them. We love the Second Amendment folks, nobody loves it more than us, so just remember that.
I want to just thank a couple of friends of mine that are here, the owner of this incredible hotel, Mr. and Mrs. Phil Ruffin, stand up. Great guy. Phil said, "Donald," — like for the last three months he's driving me crazy, he said — "Donald, I want to put $10 million into your campaign. I said, 'Phil I don't want your money. I don't want to do it. I'm self-funding.' "
Every time I see him. It's hard for me to turn down money because that's what I've done in my whole life, I grab and grab and grab. You know I get greedy I want money, money. I'll tell you what we're going to do, right? We get greedy right? Now we're going to get greedy for the United States we're going to grab and grab and grab. We're going to bring in so much money and so much everything. We're going to make America great again, folks, I'm telling you folks we're going to make America great again.
So this was very exciting tonight. But I'll tell you it looks like we won by a lot evangelicals.…It's been amazing, the relationship. So we won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.
We're the smartest people, we're the most loyal people, and you know what I'm happy about? Because I've been saying it for a long time. Forty-six percent were the Hispanics — 46 percent, No. 1 with Hispanics. I'm really happy about that.
So I'm very proud of you, this is an amazing night. I love the country, I love the country. We're going in the wrong direction. We're going to keep — as you know Gitmo, we're keeping that open, and we're going to load it up with bad dudes. We're going to load it up with a lot of bad dudes out there.
We're going to have our borders nice and strong. We're going to build the wall, you know that. We're going to build the wall. And I have a lot of respect from Mexico and you just heard we won Hispanics. But let me tell you Mexico is going to pay for the wall, right? It's going to happen. It's going to happen. They know it. I know it. We all know it.
We have a tremendous deficit. We have a trade deficit with Mexico. They'll pay for the wall. They'll be very happy about it. Believe me. I'll talk to them. They're going to be very, very thrilled. They're going to be thrilled to be paying for the wall.
We're going to be the smart people. We're not going to be the people that get pushed around all over the place. We're going to be the smart people. You're going to be proud of your president, and you're going to be even prouder of your country, okay?
The people of this country are absolutely amazing. I love you folks very much. Remember: Make America great again. We're going to do it, and it's going to happen fast. Thank you very much everybody. We love you. We love you."
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