Even amid all his legal challenges, Donald Trump has a secret weapon in his drive to win the Republican presidential nomination next year: polling strongly suggests he has transformed the GOP primary electorate in a way that will make him harder to beat.
Since Trump’s emergence as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, the college-educated voters generally most skeptical of him have declined as a share of all GOP primary voters, while the voters without a college degree generally most sympathetic to him have increased, an array of public and private polls indicate.
Those changes suggest Trump has set in motion what could prove a self-fulfilling prophecy: compared to when he first captured the nomination in 2016, he’s encouraged more participation in the Republican primaries by the blue-collar voters most inclined to support him and less by the white-collar voters likely to become the centerpiece of any coalition against him. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN
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