The focus groups that provide the most revealing reactions to Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency may be the thousands of front-door conversations held every month around the country by canvassers for the liberal organizing group Working America. Those encounters suggest Democrats could reap big gains in 2018—but are still facing big questions about their position against the president in 2020. …
These discussions, says Matt Morrison, the group’s executive director, show that voters are “experiencing … a very different America” as the Trump presidency unfolds.
In more affluent and better-educated communities, he says, voters are heavily consuming news about the daily maelstroms engulfing Trump. The perpetual chaos and conflict, he says, is powerfully energizing the college-educated voters most repulsed by Trump, especially women. And that undertow is so strong that it is tugging others around them away from the GOP: “If you live in a college-educated community, you are moving with that overall community,” Morrison says.
The story is very different in the white working-class areas that powered Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory. There, amid daily economic strain, the drama filling cable news is like a distant shout in the wind. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic