https://www.npr.org/2020/09/03/907433511/trumps-base-is-shrinking-as-whites-without-a-college-degree-continue-to-decline
Trump's Base Is Shrinking As Whites Without A College Degree Continue To Decline
President Trump's base has gotten smaller.
That's a key finding of an analysis of how the U.S. electorate has changed since 2016, based on census data analyzed by the Brookings Institution and NPR.
In 2016, Trump was helped to victory by winning a record margin among white voters without a college degree. But in the last four years, they have declined as a share of the voting-eligible population across the U.S. and in states critical to the presidential election. Nationally, the group has gone from 45% of eligible voters to 41%.
Meanwhile, some other demographic cohorts — whites with a college degree, Latinos and, to a lesser extent, Asian Americans and other groups — have all gone up.
With Trump facing an uphill reelection battle, the findings underscore that it's not just that he's winning smaller margins among some key groups, according to public opinion surveys, as compared with 2016 — but that the pool of people who appear most open to his message is shallower.
"Demography keeps moving along," said demographer William Frey, a senior fellow at Brookings who compiled and analyzed the data.
A shrinking gap
Almost two-thirds of whites without a college degree voted for Trump in 2016, and they are still among the largest voting blocs in the country. But the gap between them and other more Democratic-leaning groups is shrinking.
For example, when you combine whites with a college degree and Latinos, two groups that have voted far more in favor of Democrats, they are now almost on par with whites without a degree.
That's a big shift from 2016. Then, whites without a college degree had a 9-point advantage over whites with a degree and Latinos combined. Now, the gap is only about 2 points.
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