Boyle: The One Demographic that Could Push Trump to Victory

Almost everyone in media and politics seems obsessed with minority voters or women voters.

Both campaigns—former President Donald Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s teams—as well as most in media are constantly talking about whether Trump can make inroads with black and Hispanic voters, and whether Harris can run up Democrat totals with women. But they’re all missing the big demographic that will ultimately most likely decide this election: white men, specifically white, working-class men.

The trick of pulling together a demographically strong enough coalition to win 270 electoral votes and the White House is you have to get a LOT of votes from a lot of people. But you need to pull together enough of a percent of this group or that group or this subgroup or that subgroup to win. It’s both an art and a science, and it’s a lot easier said than done.

There are definitely some constants for politicians and political parties going into elections, and often, candidates are either trying to upset the odds or strengthen themselves with this or that part of their coalition. But in so doing, they may turn off other parts of their coalition or strengthen the other side’s coalition as an adverse reaction to something they do. The key is to score with the variables against the constants, and work within those margins to get enough votes without losing any—or only losing some—off the back end of other parts.

Demographics, election-wise, break down along several lines. There are gender demographics—men or women voters. Then there are racial demographics, like white, black, Hispanic, Asian, et cetera voters. There are education-level demographics, so no college or college degree levels or even some post-graduate degree-level voters.

There are also income level demographics, so people who make less than $30,000 a year versus higher five-figure incomes or six-figure or seven-figure incomes. And there are age demographics, voters under age 30, up to age 50, or over 50—and so on.

Understanding how these various groups feel about different issues and then communicating with them ahead of an election is how politicians win or lose elections. Effective politicians aim to get more votes from demographics with which they are strong without turning off demographics with which they are weak, and they also seek to cut into those weaker demographics to mitigate losses.

This is a vast oversimplification of things, of course, but here are some constants before we get into the variables. First off, Democrats generally put up absurdly high numbers with black voters and other voters of color. Their usual range is somewhere in the high 80s or even low 90s as a percentage of black voters, and usually they’re well into majority territory with Hispanic voters. Democrats also usually do well with women. This is a little trickier to put an exact number on, but if Democrats are not winning women voters, they have a major issue.

Republicans, meanwhile, tend to put up very big numbers with white voters, especially with men—and even more especially with working-class men, at least in recent elections (this has been a pretty big shift in the Trump era from previous decades).

When you take that baseline understanding of what a normal election turnout looks like, then you start trying to figure out how this election is going in each of these categories and how either candidate can make gains or mitigate losses in an effort to build a coalition big enough to get over the top. And on that note, it seems–based on a lot of data that’s come out over the last month or so since Democrats switched from President Joe Biden to Harris–we have a pretty clear picture of where this race will be decided.

First off, the Wall Street Journal came out with polling in late August that compared where Trump and Harris stood among key demographics as compared with the coalition Biden was able to hastily assemble to put him barely over the top in 2020. It’s worth noting: before he dropped out of the race, Biden had almost universally collapsed across the board with every demographic, and Harris has been trying to reassemble that old coalition from four years ago that got her into the Naval Observatory and Biden into the White House.

Here are some key paragraphs from the Wall Street Journal piece:

Support for Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has grown by 13 percentage points among Black voters since Biden left the race in July, combined results of Journal polls in late July and August show. She is still 10 points behind Biden’s 2020 mark.

Harris has also gained 13 points in Latino support—but lags behind Biden’s 2020 mark by 6 points.

Similarly, Harris has improved the party’s standing among young voters—those under age 30—by 7 points. But the party still has a deficit compared with 2020, when Biden’s support was 12 points higher.

So, Harris has definitely helped Democrats to an extent in stabilizing their position with black, Hispanic, and young voters. But Trump has definitely made gains, particularly with men in both the Hispanic and black community, drawing even with Harris among Hispanic men and doing an astounding eight percent better than in 2020 with black men. Trump is currently at 20 percent with them.

The Wall Street Journal piece continues by noting that if Harris cannot fully fix Democrats’ issues with black and Hispanic voters as compared with 2020—and the data seems to suggest she cannot—then the place where she is looking to go to increase her share of the vote and assemble a winning coalition is with white women.

“If Harris can’t match her party’s 2020 showing among these groups, where might she make up the votes?” the Journal’s Aaron Zitner and Stephanie Stamm wrote. “Many analysts say she can look to white voters, especially among women responding to her promises to work to restore access to abortion. If they are right, the first Black female president could have a winning coalition that relies more on white voters, and less on those from minority groups, than did the white man elected just before her.”

Democrat pollster Celinda Lake, in an interview with Mark Halperin in late August, said that for Harris to win—speaking specifically about Pennsylvania—“we’ve got to win women by more than we lose men.”

“That’s really the formula for success,” Lake said. “There are two parts to that… It’s a real Whack-A-Mole. You’ve got to keep men sullen but not mutinous, and you’ve got to win women enthusiastically.”

Did you hear that correctly? “You’ve got to keep men silent but not mutinous.” Remember that quote. That’s the key to the election; the top Democrat pollster let the cat out of the bag here. What she’s saying is that for Democrats to win, they need to run up the score with women voters—particularly white women as evidenced by the Wall Street Journal polling and other data out there—while NOT TURNING OFF MEN VOTERS.

This is where Trump needs to drive a Mack truck through the Democrats’ best-laid plans. Yes, keep trying to peel off minority voters. Yes, keep trying to hold off any losses among women voters. But the key to this election, plain and simple, is men. Men will decide the next president of the United States.

Will men stand by and allow themselves to be “sullen but not mutinous,” or will they get angry enough at the left’s radicalism and Harris’s insanity and what’s happening to our country that they vote to shut it down and course correct?

Even MSNBC seems to be picking up on Harris’s weakness among men:

Trump is the master of grievance politics driven by emotion and anger, and he specializes in appealing to this exact kind of sentiment. His running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) was made for this moment too, and the two of them together could diametrically destruct this best-laid Democrat plan.

In fact, while they do not usually say it all this explicitly, some of the smarter people across media seem to understand this. CNN’s David Chalian, when breaking down battleground polls from the network, said Trump’s “advantage” with male voters is “very significant.” When broken down further along racial lines, Chalian added that among white non-college voters, Trump has a very big advantage over Harris, warning that “this is a trouble sign for Harris.” He noted that Trump is even winning white, college-educated voters in Georgia.

So, it seems like, based on all the above and more, that despite the conventional wisdom of focusing on women or minority voters, the place where the election will be won or lost is whether and how Trump is able to run up the score with men—or whether he falls short there. In other words, the key demographic to winning this election is white, non-college, male voters and some white college-educated men.