Posted on 07/19/2015 9:10:17 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Last weekend, Donald Trump added to his long list of bold claims by declaring himself the champion of a new “silent majority” of Americans.
While 17 percent of Republican voters isn’t a majority, and the 4,000 raucous supporters cheering him in Arizona were anything but silent, Trump has hurtled to the top of several recent GOP primary polls. Apparently, he speaks for some Americans. So who are they and where did they come from?
As it turns out, the Trump coalition looks a lot like the rest of the Republican Party. Other than a spike in support in the Northeast, there is little in recent polling data to distinguish Trump’s supporters from the heart of the GOP primary electorate. Even immigration hardliners support him at the same rate as the rest of the Republican Party.
“It’s a strange coalition of people,” said Patrick Murray of Monmouth University. “We can’t pin them down demographically. … It appears he’s cherry-picked individual voters.”
Interviews with Trump supporters at a rally on Saturday in Phoenix and in New Hampshire, where he was among the first candidates to hire staffers, suggest he is attracting Republicans from many corners of the party who are drawn to his image as a straight-talking businessman who would shake up politics as usual.
“The issues that are driving the average Trump voter are, first and foremost, that he’s not a politician. Secondly, he is self-funding his campaign, so he can’t be bought,” said Steve Stepanek, Trump’s New Hampshire co-chairman, who supported Newt Gingrich in 2012 and Rudy Giuliani in 2008.
“People today are looking for plainspoken people who say what’s on their mind,” said Lou Gargiulo, a New Hampshire activist and Trump’s Rockingham County co-chair who supported Mitt Romney in the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries.
Trump voters skew older, whiter and more male, but no more so than the rest of the Republican primary electorate.
In a Monmouth poll released on Monday that put Trump in second place and a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released on Tuesday that put him in first, the real estate mogul fared better among somewhat conservative voters and very conservative secular voters than he did among moderates and religious conservatives.
At least in that way, said Murray, they really are like Richard Nixon’s silent majority of middle Americans. “They’re in the middle of the Republican Party. They’re not evangelicals. They’re not hardline social or fiscal conservatives. They’re also not on the liberal side of the party,” he said.
Because Trump had flirted with running for president before without jumping in, many observers doubted he would do so, and most polls before mid-May did not include his name.
Trump’s rise came so suddenly and unexpectedly, and Republican voters are divided among so many candidates, that the data to fully understand the Trump coalition does not yet exist, said Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown.
What Murray can say definitively about Trump is that he is an anomaly. In a Monmouth poll released a month ago, Trump had the worst favorability rating of any Republican candidate among Republican voters, 20 percent favorable to 55 percent unfavorable, a fact cited by many political observers in pooh-poohing his viability. In the poll out this week, Trump’s favorability has pulled nearly even at 41-40. The swing was even more dramatic among self-identified tea party voters, who went from viewing him unfavorably, 55 percent to 20 percent, to viewing him favorably 56 percent to 26 percent.
“I’ve never seen a candidate who’s so well known who was able to suddenly turn around people’s opinions of him,” Murray said.
Even as Republican elites decried his claims about the alleged criminality of undocumented Mexican immigrants (which defy all available evidence) and brands cut ties with him, a large chunk of GOP primary voters were evaluating him in a positive light.
Joan Riscki, 67, a Phoenix resident and retiree, is an independent who voted for Mitt Romney in the general election in 2012. “I usually vote for Democrats, but it’s a bad situation now,” she told POLITICO outside Trump’s rally on Saturday. “They’re all liars anyways. I try not to listen to the news. I listen to KFYI,” a local conservative talk radio station.
Matt Bates, 52, a property manager from Scottsdale, who remains uncommitted to a presidential candidate, said he found out about the Trump event from his in-laws, who had heard about it on Fox News. “He’s not a politician, he’s a businessman,” Bates said of Trump’s appeal.
His wife, Stephanie, 52, a grocery store manager, said she supports Trump. “His views are similar to the GOP, but he’s not in anybody’s pocket,” she said. “You can’t trust the rest of them.”
Hazel Powell, 68, also of Phoenix, is a retired Peace Corps volunteer (she felt the need to leave the country after Obama’s election) and a fan of “The Apprentice,” Trump’s reality show on NBC. “I’ve always liked Donald with his television shows, his aggressiveness. He just speaks the truth,” she said.
The crowd in Phoenix was overwhelmingly white (as is the Republican primary electorate), and Trump’s fellow Republicans have condemned his comments about undocumented immigrants as racist, but Powell said he would eventually win over Latinos. “The Latinos are going to support him because they’re smart enough to know: He’s going to get them jobs.”
Trump has made the same claim, saying that “tens of thousands” of Latinos have worked for him over the years and that they “love” him.
In New Hampshire, Trump is currently polling second to Bush.
Greg Moore, the state director for the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity, which lost several staffers to Trump’s Granite State effort, has gotten an up-close look at the mogul’s supporters. His offices share a building with Trump’s campaign. He said he sees a lot of unfamiliar faces coming and going from Trump’s New Hampshire headquarters — not the state’s typical Republican activist crowd.
“They seem to be galvanized [by] a notion that Washington is hopelessly corrupt – and you need somebody who is completely outside of the process to go in there and shake things up,” he said. “Immigration really isn’t an issue in New Hampshire, but for a lot of these folks, I think immigration speaks more broadly to a federal government that’s not doing its job as effectively as they think it should be or could be.”
Despite Trump’s recent success capitalizing on widespread discontent with Washington, establishment Republicans say they aren’t worried his support will make him a viable candidate.
“I don’t think in the end, people when they vote in the primary will throw their vote away,” said Judd Gregg, a former senator and New Hampshire governor. “They’re not going to vote for somebody who isn’t a legitimate candidate for the nomination who can win the nomination and can govern.”
What do you know about his work background Nick? After all, you know so much more about Trump than the rest of us, like the ‘fact’ that he wasn’t worth anywhere near $9 billion dollars. Enlighten us some more Nick. And don’t feel in any way constrained by the facts. They’ve never constrained you before.
What makes me laugh is this guy seems to think Trump has targeted all this little demographic groups. The truth is he’s speaking about the ONE issue which EVERYONE cares about. He’s not targeting demographic groups, he’s targeting ISSUES.
I CAN’T HEAR YOU. LOUDER!!!!!
I believe he mentioned in his Phoenix speech that SuperPACs had been set-up to support him but that he didn’t ask them to.
He may have been addressing Larry King (I can't really remember) but the point is that the person he was talking to had some bad breath going on.
Trump, incredulous, bluntly said words to the effect: "Your breath smells terribly bad. It's quite offensive. Has no one told you this?"
The 2016 election, and Washington DC in general, could sure use a large dose of that type of apolitical candor!
With someone like Trump (or Perot, for instance) I could forgive a lot of policy disagreements, just to have somebody in the White House who will fearlessly call a spade a spade.
Donald Trump is somewhat reminiscent of H. Ross Perot back in 1992. Perot probably would have won the general election had he not dropped out and then suddenly jumped back in with 30 days to go before the election. Even so, he garnered more than 20% of the popular vote, if I remember correctly, which resulted in Bill Clinton being elected by a distinct minority of the People.
Trump is for real. He's going to have to become more deeply knowledgeable and nuanced about many issues, and he's going to have to be a little more tactful (while preserving his candor), but Trump's in-your-face honesty and frankness is going to carry him quite far, IMHO. Trump should not be underestimated or dismissed.
I, for one, hope Donald Trump starts to take this race very seriously (if he hasn't already) and I further hope that he surrounds himself with some trustworthy friends and consultants to help him with his style, presentation, and the like.
Trump doesn't need to radically change, but he probably needs to be a bit more careful in what he says, if he really intends to engage in a prolonged and exhausting Presidential campaign. Steady wins the race.
Above all else, Trump needs to hit his detractors hard, especially his potential Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
The lamestream media and the Establishment elites are going to go full bore in trying to damage and discredit Trump. I hope they aren't successful, and my gut is telling me that Trump is already beyond their ability to control or destroy.
And that is a very refreshing feeling.
We're in for a fierce and very entertaining fight, and at this point there's no question in my mind that Trump will be a formidable candidate.
Did I hear right that Cruz met with Trump recently? I would love to have been a fly on the wall in that meeting!
Win or lose, Donald Trump is raising the level of discussion about issues which really matter to a lot of Americans. He's obviously not couching his positions within the traditional PC framework which dominates both sides of the fake spectrum, and therefore he's already got most politicians quaking in their boots and pissing down their legs.
I'm glad to have Donald Trump in the race, and I hope he sticks around long enough to force a open, honest, and candid debate about many issues which would otherwise be handled with the typical empty, blasé inside-the-beltway PC rhetoric.
This 2016 Presidential race is going to be something to behold...
The URL that I posted in reply #10 was the location of an article that was originally written by Wayne Allen Root.
Thanks for that. At least he hasn’t had any $30K a plate fundraisers yet. I don’t really expect it either.
Thats a spot on post Hildy— love it.
“It’s a strange coalition of people,” said Murray, “We can’t pin them down... It appears he’s cherry-picked individual voters.”
That’s funny, if not absurd! Some university ivory tower guy cannot understand the feelings of the average American, therefore it must be a devious and clever scheme on Trump’s part!
Really. I’d never vote for him but his stance on the issue is exactly the same as mine. I was all in on Walker a good 2 years ago but Cruz is clearly head and shoulders above this field now. There’s nobody else i can support.
Perot was too short, and had a high pitched annoying voice. His chances of winning were poor at best. On top of that he acted paranoid about someone crashing his daughter’s wedding and dropped out of the race, to rejoin later. He was a strange character. But he was patriotic.
My test for weather I could support a candidate in the primaries is wether or not they will grow the party if they run in the general. Cruz, Trump and Walker all make that minimum threshold, the rest of the field will leave the party in much the same place, or in the case of Bush, will actually shrink the party. I have thought Trump was a buffoon, but quite frankly he is growing on me.
I read the first paragraph. I didn’t need a bunch of pablum to tell me why Donald Trump.
I think it’s great Trump is stirring the pot.I enjoy the fact he’s getting the Republicans riled up. I won’t vote for him.
Polling science hasn’t yet learned how to deal with crazy people. /sarc
Perot started to get close enough to win and the “establishment” then threatened his weak spot. He really didn’t want to be President. They knew it. He was gone. Trump may have to be shot.
“I, for one, hope Donald Trump... surrounds himself with some trustworthy friends and consultants to help him with his style, presentation, and the like.”
And not just on those superficial aspects. Carry that into the White House. Being able to identify, hire, and listen to competent, smart people can result in huge success. Obviously, Trump knows how to do that. Ditto for Reagan.
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