Thank God for Joe Biden.
"The former vice president is touting his Scranton, Pa., roots and arguing that Mr. Trump has reneged on his promises to revitalize American manufacturing. He hopes to cut into the president’s edge with working-class white voters, many of whom backed Democrats in the past.
“They’re coming back home,” Mr. Biden said on the campaign trail recently. “Even if we just cut the margin, it makes a gigantic difference, a gigantic difference. A lot of white, working-class Democrats thought we forgot them and didn’t pay attention.”...
In 2016, white voters without a college degree made up 44% of the overall electorate, according to Pew Research. Mr. Trump won non-college-educated white men by 48 percentage points, according to exit polls.
A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed Mr. Trump leading Mr. Biden among white men without college degrees by 19 percentage points, down from 35 points in Journal/NBC polling through the first eight months of the year. The survey was taken after the raucous first presidential debate but before news emerged of Mr. Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis.
Among white women without college degrees, Mr. Trump led by 8 percentage points in the October poll, compared with his 27-point advantage in 2016 exit polling.
In Pennsylvania, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll indicated that Mr. Trump’s lead among white voters without college degrees had fallen by about 20 points from four years ago.
The Democratic candidate has in recent weeks framed the election as a choice between “Park Avenue and Scranton,” contrasting Mr. Trump’s background as a Manhattan real-estate mogul with his own as an Irish Catholic Pennsylvania native. The former vice president has emphasized that, if elected, he would be the first president since Ronald Reagan without an Ivy League degree.
“I’ve dealt with guys like Trump my whole life—the guys who might let you park the cars at their country club, pick up a few bucks, but even if you had the money wouldn’t let you join that country club,” Mr. Biden said while campaigning in New Alexandria, Pa., in late September. “I think he basically looks down on us. He judges us.”....
Rep. Conor Lamb, a Democrat who in 2018 flipped a Pennsylvania district Mr. Trump won by 20 percentage points, said Mr. Biden might not win the working-class white vote in November. But he believed this election would mark a turning point.
“We are in the midst of a longer-term project, beyond this election, of going back and trying to regain the trust of these people who really were a pillar of the Democratic Party for a long time,” Mr. Lamb said. “I think the lesson of 2016 was that we had let that pillar collapse. You don’t get that pillar back overnight.”
But you can make progress in rebuilding it. That's what Biden is doing and it is a central reason he is winning right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.