President Donald Trump is bleeding support from a demographic he needs to win re-election.
White voters cast nearly three-fourths of all ballots in 2016, and Trump won them by about 15 points nationwide, but Joe Biden has cut that lead down to single digits in recent polls, reported Politico.
“It’s a big, big swing,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. “What [Biden’s] doing among whites is more than offsetting the slippage among non-whites … The recipe is very different this time, right now anyway, in terms of white voters.”
The president’s appeals to racism aren’t resonating with white voters as they did four years ago, and that could cost him in November.
“Suburban whites are pretty much gone,” said Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “If Trump loses Pennsylvania by four or five points, then the suburbs and the working-class whites, that accounts for the loss.”
The coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic misery appear to have cut into Trump’s support with older white voters.
“It’s these older white voters that I think are the ones that are moving” away from Trump, said Democratic strategist Jeff Link. “The older people are like, ‘What the f*ck is this guy doing?”