Wake Up to Politics: Trump Made Gains With Muslim Voters. Now It’s Falling Apart
Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini recently made a point on a podcast that has stuck with me. “In order to have a majority coalition in this country, the coalition needs to not entirely make sense,” he said.
By way of example, he pointed to the coalition that lifted Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 and 2012. Obama famously performed well among so-called “ascendant” voters: Black voters, Hispanic voters, millennials, college-educated whites. But that was not enough to win the White House. Obama only got across the finish line with the support of white working-class voters in key states. It was a marriage of demographic opposites: white and non-white, those rising the socioeconomic ladder and those falling down it. In a country as large and diverse as ours, that is what you need to win. A coalition broad enough that it doesn’t entirely make sense.
