In a recent interview, Steve Bannon declared that “The Republican college-educated woman is done. They’re gone. They were going anyway at some point in time. Trump triggers them.”
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump decided to check this out, and it turns out that Bannon is right:
Working-class white men support Trump, but they’ve returned to reality a bit from the election and now support him by a net of about 28 points. Working-class white women and college-educated white men are bouncing around in the middle. But college-educated white women? They support Democrats by a net of nearly 50 points. And it shows no signs of bouncing back and forth. The more they see and hear of Trump, the more they hate him. Maybe this is the reason. I don’t know. But thanks to Trump, college-educated white women would apparently be pretty happy to see the Republican Party annihilated and replaced with something else.
Trump has had the same effect, but a bit smaller, on every other demographic group too, wiping out most of the Republican Party’s gains made during the Obama era. The only exception is white-working-class men, which was never really a Trump effect in the first place. They’ve been leaving the Democratic Party steadily ever since the Democrats nominated a black guy for president. But even their support for Republicans has taken a dip lately.
But even for all those angry white guys, I wonder if they’re starting to see Trump as an empty suit. Sure, he talks big, but there’s still no wall; NAFTA remains in place; North Korea still has nukes; he caved to Europe on trade; Putin seems to have him by the balls; Mueller seems to keep finding a lot of smoke, rich people keep getting tax cuts; and their own paychecks don’t seem any bigger than usual. Trump better start delivering soon if he wants to keep all those working-class white guys in his camp.
