Will Trump’s Racist Attacks Help Him? Ask Blue-Collar White Women.

• His strategy rests on a bet: that these voters will respond just as enthusiastically to his belligerence as working-class white men.
  
  RONALD BROWNSTEINJUL 25, 2019
  
  MANUEL BALCE CENETA / AP
  Donald Trump’s turn toward more overt racism in his “go back” attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of color rests on an unspoken bet: that the women who are part of his core constituencies will respond to his acrimony as enthusiastically as the men.
  
  
  But polling throughout Trump’s presidency has indicated that his belligerent and divisive style raises more concern among women voters than men in one of his most important cohorts: the white working class. And a new set of focus groups in small-town and rural communities offers fresh evidence that the gender gap over Trump within this bloc is hardening.
  
  
  In the Rust Belt states that tipped the 2016 election to Trump—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—few things may matter more than whether Democrats can fan doubts about Trump that have surfaced among blue-collar white women or whether the president can rebuild his margins among them with his polarizing racial and ideological attacks.
  
  “The white working-class men look like they are approaching the 2016 margins for Trump, but not the women,” says the veteran Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, in a judgment supported by public polling. “Clearly the women are in a different place.” Greenberg conducted the focus groups, whose findings were releasedtoday, for the American Federation of Teachers.
  
  
  In both parties, most strategists I’ve spoken with agree that Trump’s bellicose attacks on the congresswomen will harden the opposition he faces among the groups most accepting of America’s changing identity: young people, minorities, and college-educated white voters, especially women. What’s more, his new offensive represents exactly the sort of behavior that has led an unprecedented number of voters satisfied with the economy to nonetheless express doubts about his leadership: In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released earlier this week, fully one-third of adults who said the economy is working for them personally still said they disapprove of Trump’s job performance. An equal share of these voters said they now intend to vote against him for reelection. To offset that unusual defection among the economically content, Trump must maximize his margins—and turnout—among the groups that have been most receptive to his exclusionary racist and cultural messages: older, nonurban, evangelical-Christian, and non-college-educated white voters.
  
  
  But Trump’s strategy faces a huge obstacle if working-class women don’t buy in to his message as much as working-class men. That’s for a simple reason: Every data source—from the exit polls to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of voter files to studies by Catalist, a Democratic voter-targeting firm—shows that these women reliably cast slightly more than half of all the votes from the white working class.
  
  “If you think about the strategy they had in ’16 … where he campaigned and went into these [blue-collar and nonmetropolitan] areas and really drove up the vote—that doesn’t work if the women aren’t responding to it, if they watch him and they get put off by it,” Greenberg says. “It only works if women are part of the story. You just can’t get the numbers if half of white working-class, nonmetro voters are put off by what you are doing.”
  
  White working-class women have been a reliably Republican-leaning constituency for the past generation. Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 is the only Democratic presidential candidate since 1980 who has carried them. Data measuring the 2016 vote show that Trump expanded the GOP margins with these women to the highest level in years: His advantage ranged from 21 percentage points, according to calculations by Catalist; to 23 points, according to Pew; to 27 points, according to
  
  But in 2018, Republicans sagged among these women. Nationally, GOP House candidates still won their vote overall, but by less robust margins than Trump did two years before: 14 points per the exit polls and 17 percent per the Catalist calculations. And Democrats in 2018 generally performed much better with these voters in marquee Senate and governor’s contests in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. (Only in the Senate race in Michigan and in the governor’s race in Wisconsin did Republicans retain a solid lead with these voters.)
  
  
  
  
  But among the women, those areas of agreement were mitigated by other concerns about Trump, including their belief that, on immigration, “his rhetoric … made him sound ‘racist’ or ‘ignorant,’” as the report notes. “There were a lot of mentions of intolerance in reaction to what he was saying and doing,” Greenberg says.
  
  More at link.
  

• https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...ack-attacks-white-working-class-women/594805/

 

This.

 

I think the takeaway from this is that those type of voters are wavering.

Trump doesn't have a huge margin and it's will serve to depress his voters more than energize them IMO.

 

Yeah I don't understand why the question from interviewers is always is Trump a racist or do you think what he said was racist.

The need to just answer why they thought it was wrong and remove racism out of the equation.