Any path Donald Trump might take to the presidency inevitably leads through the Rust Belt and industrial Midwest—the places the Republican nominee describes as “rusting and rotting” war zones of manufacturing decline. …
Since the parties’ conventions this summer, the candidates and their running mates have held nearly 40 campaign events in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan alone—averaging at least one every other day when you count surrogate appearances from Vice President Joe Biden, the Obama-Clinton machine’s designated working-man whisperer.
To explore these three states—tethered by shared economic wounds, but each with its own complexities—Bloomberg Politics mined the same databases campaigns use to sort through the electorate. Our quest was to find the disaffected, currently Democratic, working-class white males Trump appears to be wooing with his appeals to economic angst—and the ones he’ll need to change the electoral arithmetic in the states in question. CONT.
Steven Yaccino & Sasha Issenberg, Bloomberg Politics