To: Ron who wrote (318237 ) 11/15/2016 8:38:40 AM From: Alex MG Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 542904 newrepublic.com The average Trump voter is not poorly educated or unemployed , nor does he live in a rural area. Back in May, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver punctured the myth of the “working class” being Trump’s voter base: In exit polls of 23 states from the primaries, all showed a higher median income for Trump supporters than the national average, usually around $70,000. Exit polls last week, while not definitive, reveal that both college-educated white men and college educated white women voted for Trump by much higher than expected margins. While it is true that many rural voters who backed Obama in 2008 and 2012 voted for Trump this year, these voters hardly comprise the majority of Trump’s 60 million votes, as rural voters made up only 17 percent of this year’s electorate. Most rural voters generally vote Republican anyway. Clinton’s decision not to target these voters may seem foolhardy in hindsight, but these voters have not been a key Democratic demographic for many decades. Moreover, as a longtime member of the Washington establishment, Clinton was always going to be a hard sell to these voters in a change election. The voters Clinton really lost—the ones she was targeting and relying on for victory—were college-educated whites. Most polling suggested she would win these voters, but she didn’t, according to exit polls: White men went 63 percent for Trump versus 31 percent for Clinton, and white women went 53-43 percent. Among college-educated whites, only 39 percent of men and 51 percent of women voted for Clinton. Clinton’s strategy made sense. Trump’s negatives among this group, which normally leans Republican (Romney won them by six points), were pretty high in polling . What’s more, these people hadn’t suffered under Obama; they’d thrived. The kind of change Trump was espousing wasn’t supposed to connect with this group. A massive Gallup study in August revealed that the typical Trump supporter has “not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.” Perhaps, then, these Trump voters are the most deplorable of them all. They’re not suffering or desperate, and have no concrete reason to hate the status quo or to feel like they are in decline. They understand that Trump is manifestly unprepared to be president, and heard his many lies and insults, yet still voted for him anyway. And without them, Trump wouldn’t have won. The media ought to focus on their motivations, too—and reporters won’t even have to fly to Youngstown to find them.