It’s safe to say that virtually all political professionals think Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is doomed. The odds of him winning the Republican nomination are long, and the odds of him winning the general election are nonexistent, they say. … If the eventual Republican nominee needs 47 percent of the […] Read more »
What Donald Trump Understands About Republicans
Donald Trump’s success is no surprise. The public and the press have focused on his defiant rejection of mannerly rhetoric, his putting into words of what others think privately. But the more important truth is that a half-century of Republican policies on race and immigration have made the party the […] Read more »
How Iowa’s Population Mix Might Scramble its High-Stakes Caucuses
… Though immigration has not been a central issue in local Iowa politics, attitudes about the growing racial diversity recasting this once monolithically white state could add an unpredictable new element to the presidential competition here. CONT. Ronald Brownstein, National Journal Read more »
Trump Preaching to Shrinking White Electorate Creates Problems for GOP
… The Republican electoral coalition now relies on preponderant majorities from the groups most unsettled by demographic and cultural change: older, noncollege, and rural whites. There are no longer enough of those voters to guarantee Republicans a national majority; that’s why Democrats have won the popular vote in five of […] Read more »
Will Trump’s view on immigration hurt the GOP? Maybe not.
A recent Monkey Cage post by Patrick J. Egan claimed that the Republican Party is hurt by Donald Trump’s immigration policies. But the post presented polling data only on the policy question of what to do with illegal immigrants already in the United States and on the general question of […] Read more »
This chart explains how Trump’s stand on immigration is hurting the Republican Party
… As shown above, in every survey since 2006, approval of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants has never dipped below 50 percent—and in many polls it’s been consistently much higher than that. … Heck, even a majority of Republicans favored immigration reform that would allow long-term undocumented immigrants […] Read more »