06/02/2023

President was also able to attract voters in small cities and rural areas of the South and the West, but experienced a revolt among college-educated suburban voters

Support among some Latino voters and a strong turnout from his loyal working-class base have put Donald Trump into a fighting position to hang on to his presidency.
As vote counts continued to trickle in from several battleground states, results across the Southern United States pointed to both weaknesses and enduring strengths in Mr. Trumps nationalist brand of politics after four years in office.
A concerted effort to appeal to Hispanic voters particularly Cuban-Americans appeared to pay dividends for the Republican incumbent in Florida. Meanwhile, Trump supporters came out in droves in small cities and rural areas of the South and the West, helping to narrow the race in some key states.
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But Mr. Trump also experienced a revolt among college-educated suburban voters particularly women in states such as Georgia and North Carolina. Both are formerly Republican strongholds where Mr. Trump was leading by razor-thin margins on Wednesday.
The shifting political landscape in the suburbs of the Sun Belt the temperate southern region of the country stretching from Florida to California is a troubling sign for Republicans, given that the region was once pivotal to the partys presidential victories.
Mr. Trump won Florida by a healthy margin thanks in part to an unexpected surge in support among Latino voters in the state. He won Cuban-American communities in South Florida by more than 100,000 votes, shaving Democrat Joe Bidens lead in Miami-Dade County to 52 per cent, down 10 points from Hillary Clintons 2016 performance in the county.
Exit polls showed Mr. Trump also won about half the votes cast in Florida by those who identify as having Central American heritage. And he saw a jump in support in Osceola County, a heavily Puerto Rican region of Central Florida.
While Republicans have long held an advantage among Cuban-Americans, Mr. Trump courted Latino voters throughout the campaign, particularly those whose families fled oppressive regimes in Cuba and Venezuela. The Republican nominee appealed to them with messages that Democrats were radical leftists bent on turning the United States into a socialist country.
His administration also reversed many of the Obama-era efforts to normalize relations with Cuba. Such moves have played well among many Cuban-Americans in the state, according to an October survey by Florida International University that predicted Mr. Trump would win the states Cuban vote by 58 per cent. (Exit polls suggest 59 per cent of Cuban voters in Florida supported Mr. Trump.)
The results cascaded through other races in the Miami area, where Democrats lost two Congressional seats.
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Some Democrats said they warned the Biden campaign it was taking the support of Latinos and non-white voters for granted in the state.
Imagine having seasoned Puerto Rican and Black political operatives in Florida. Now imagine hiring none of them when it mattered, not listening to any of us when we offered advice, and hav[ing] the hubris of feeling infallible, Frederick Velez III Burgos, national director of civic engagement the Hispanic Federation, an advocacy group, wrote on Twitter. That is how Florida was lost.
Mr. Trump even improved his standing in the Rio Grande Valley, a traditionally Democratic and heavily Latino region of South Texas that has been the focus of the Presidents efforts to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Democrats had spent heavily in Texas in hopes of flipping the state, a victory that would have all but assured Mr. Biden won the White House.
Some analysts pointed to the Trump campaigns willingness to engage in door-to-door canvassing as responsible for boosting support among Latino voters in Texas. Democrats accused Mr. Trump of being reckless and irresponsible by running in-person events during a pandemic that has killed more than 240,000 Americans. But the strategy may have given him the edge over Mr. Biden, whose campaign relied more on virtual events and advertising.
The biggest mistake the Democrats made and they will rue this is when they decided to…virtue signal [that] they werent going to go door-to-door, Dave Carney, chief political adviser to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, told the Texas Tribune.
Mr. Trumps efforts to urge supporters to vote in person rather than by mail and his decision to hold large-scale rallies in the weeks leading up to the election also seemed to encourage his base to show up in large numbers on election day. While Mr. Biden won among voters who cast ballots by mail in Southern states, exit polls showed Mr. Trump won among those who voted in person, both early and on Tuesday.
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Turnout appeared to be up in many of the smaller cities and rural areas of states like Florida, Georgia and Texas that had supported Mr. Trump in 2016. Turnout reached nearly 90 per cent in the Florida counties of Collier and Sumter, both Republican strongholds.
But even as Mr. Trump managed to turn out waves of his core supporters, he also appeared to turn off many moderate voters in fast-growing suburbs of the Sun Belt. Exit polls showed Mr. Trump consistently struggled among moderate voters in Southern and Western states and did particularly poorly among college-educated women in the suburbs.
Mr. Trump lost ground in cities like Dallas and Austin, along with their suburbs, which shaved his margin of victory in Texas to six points, down from nine in 2016. The candidates also remained locked in a tight battle for the suburbs of North Carolina, where Democrats managed to flip two Congressional seats.
But it was suburban Phoenix that dealt Mr. Trump his most significant blow of the election, helping tilt Arizona in favour of Mr. Biden. Should he win, it would be only the second time the state backed a Democratic presidential candidate in 70 years.
With losses in Michigan and Wisconsin and potentially Nevada, a defeat in Arizona could be enough to cost Mr. Trump the White House.
Still, analysts warn that should Mr. Trump lose the election, the result would be far from a repudiation of the Presidents divisive brand of populist politics.
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Mr. Trump showed us holes in the system that were always there but never so serious, said Samuel Popkin, a retired political scientist from the University of California, San Diego. When a lot of people lose faith in the central tenets of a political party, theyre available for the right promise-making outsider.
That will present a continuing challenge both for Republicans and Democrats over the next four years, said Donald Critchlow, Katzin Family Professor at Arizona State University . The fight will be over which party can capture this pervasive anti-elitist populist sentiment evident among voters.