New Poll Shows Trump Losing Support Among ‘Poorly Educated’ Whites

When Donald Trump famously declared, “I love the poorly educated” during his 2016 campaign, it was obvious that he was taking a much more populist (or rather, pseudo-populist) approach than Republican presidential candidates were typically known for. And white males without college degrees continue to be a key part of the president’s base. But Washington Post columnist Aaron Blake, analyzing an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Monday, stresses that when Trump is up against a “generic 2020 Democrat,” he finds himself struggling with non-college educated white women.

“The story is not that Trump is struggling because he’s losing white women,” Blake asserts. “The story is that he’s struggling because he’s losing ground among another much-heralded demographic: less-educated whites.”

The “less educated whites” Blake is specifically referring to are white women without college degrees. The NBC/WSJ poll finds that Trump’s performance is especially bad among college educated white women: when up against a generic Democrat in 2020, Trump only wins 30 percent of white women with college degrees — compared to 63 percent for the generic Democrat. But Trump, Blake stresses, doesn’t do well among high school-educated white women either: among white women without college degrees, 43 percent of the vote goes to Trump — while 49 percent goes to the generic Democrat.

View the complete August 20 article by Alex Henderson from AlterNet on the National Memo website here.