America’s Top Political Analyst: Trump Made Republican Soccer Moms and Manginas Politically Irrelevant!

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

Medieval Scholastic Nitpicking, Part 2

June 26, 2017
By Countenance Blogmeister

Atlanta
My illegitimate father writes in RCP about GA-6:

Georgia’s 6th District was significant because it’s a traditionally Republican district whose college-educated voters (59 percent of adults, sixth-highest in the country) were repelled by Donald Trump. Mitt Romney carried it 61 to 37 percent in 2012; Trump won it by only a 48.3-46.8 percent margin last year. That’s a huge shift from the persistent partisan patterns that have mostly held for two decades.

President Romney carried the district bigly, while private citizen Trump only won it narrowly.

Wait what?

In a related note, I’ve been pointing you to various precinct-by-precinct maps produced and curated by one Ryne Rohla. Not long ago, he put up the Missouri-specific map, but has not yet put together a 16-delta-12 map for Missouri. As you can see, he does have a 16-delta-12 map for the whole country, which one can click to enlarge. And, in our area, you can see that the most notable and acute red-to-blue swing was in and close to the Highway 40 corridor and Olive corridor from the city limits on through to Chesterfield. That confirms the national trend, again as you can see on the national 16-delta-12 map that upper middle to upper income suburbs of major cities swung very noticeably from Republican/Romney in 2012 to Democrat/Hillary in 2016.

Which certainly served President Romney and President Rodham well.

Wait what?

Also remember my snarky post from back in December about this matter. Putting this all together, we can now yield some object lessons:

(1) There are two main reasons why we hear what is really irrelevant noise about suburban higher income college educated Republican leaning white voters: (A) Socially, to use them as a fulcrum to make fun of downscale Trump voters, and (B) Because of what I wrote back in December, see that post’s comments, that Conservatism Inc think tanks and consulting firms heavily rely on donations from suburban higher income college educated Republican leaning white voters who swung heavily from red in ’12 to blue in ’16. Of course the people that think and write for such institutions will try to contend that the people writing them checks are still politically relevant and still politically matter.

(2) In spite of that, suburban higher income college educated Republican leaning white voters really don’t matter. Romney won them by landslide margins but finished south of 270, while Trump only carried them slightly and finished north of 270. Which means that even an unwarshed normie can look at this and conclude that there is a necessary trade-off between around 20% of suburban higher income college educated Republican leaning white voters on the one hand, and winning on the other hand. In the local context, the fact that the 40 and Olive corridors through St. Louis County is dark blue on Ryne’s 16-delta-12 really hurt Trump, as it meant the difference between Romney winning Missouri by 9 and Trump winning Missouri by 18. Nationally, Trump lost a fair percentage of that demographic around many big cities, but his consolation prize was Iowa, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, the latter three were last red during the Reagan Presidency.