To understand why a majority of GOP voters are currently supporting candidates who espouse a populist-heavy, anti-establishment message, you need to look no further than the data laid out below. This is a GOP electorate that is decidedly pessimistic, suspicious of social/cultural change and resistant to compromise.
1. White voters are the GOP base, and they are not happy.It’s one thing for Americans to say that they think the country is “headed in the wrong direction," it’s another thing when they think that the American Dream is pretty much dead. And, white voters, especially those who didn’t go to college, are pretty pessimistic about the future of the American Dream. Polling culled by the Washington Post/Fusion in 2015 and Roper/Wall Street Journal in 1986 found that in 1986, eleven percent of white Americans who did not go to college thought the American Dream was “not really alive.” That number tripled in 2015, with more than one-third of non-college whites believing that the American Dream is dead (or close to dead). A smaller, but still significant 25 percent of
Subscribe Today
Our subscribers have first access to individual race pages for each House, Senate and Governors race, which will include race ratings (each race is rated on a seven-point scale) and a narrative analysis pertaining to that race.