The New York Times did a demographic analysis of areas which have voted in the ongoing presidential primary. They found some intriguing correlations among places where Republican front-runner Donald Trump has performed well. They write:
The places where Trump has done well cut across many of the usual fault lines of U.S. politics — North and South, liberal and conservative, rural and suburban. One element common to a significant share of his supporters is that they have largely missed the generation long transition of the U.S. away from manufacturing and into a diverse, information-driven economy deeply intertwined with the rest of the world.
“It’s a nonurban, blue-collar and now apparently quite angry population,” said William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer. “They’re not people who have moved around a lot, and things have been changing away from them, but they live in areas that feel stagnant in a lot of ways.”
Trump also has healthy shares of support from the affluent and the well educated. But in the places where support for him runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that did not finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.
It seems “Mobile Home Owners” for Trump is a plausible if unlikely coalition.
The analysis hardly proves surprising. Trump is winning over crowds with vague promises of greatness which he plans to deliver through “really smart thinking.” They say public speaking should aim for a fifth-grade level of comprehension. Trump certainly hits that target.
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