How Hillary Loses to Donald Trump

For those still on the “Oh God, Hillary is going to slaughter Trump” express, now might be a good time to start making your way to the exits.

David S. Bernstein lays out four ways Hillary can lose. Fortunately for Trump, she seems to be managing them all:

  • “Step 1: Take Hispanic enthusiasm for granted.” Trump needs only for Hispanic voting to return to 2008 levels to win in Florida.
  • “Step 2: Alienate the young.” You can’t assume all those young Bernie Sanders voters who are seeing Clinton shamelessly cheat her way to the nomination are going to magically put aside their bitterness and vote for Granny Crooked McCankles.
  • “Step 3: Let establishment Republicans find another place to go.” Not sure about this one, as I see #NeverTrump as more an online/insider issue than one that could deliver significant numbers of disgruntled Republican voters to Hillary.
  • “Step 4: Fumble on trade.” Never mind that protectionism is loser economics, Hillary’s been on every side of just about every trade agreement, and her vital union allies are more than a little tired of it.

    It’s not hard to see how quickly this could start costing her Electoral College votes in the Rust Belt, where Trump hopes to improve on past Republican performance. (And where, you may remember, Clinton had to apologize for threatening to put coal companies out of business.) In Ohio, for example, 22 percent of 2012 voters came from union households, and 60 percent of them voted for Obama. In Wisconsin, a similar share of the electorate voted 2-to-1 for Obama over Romney. In 2016, both states went for Sanders over Clinton in their primaries. In Pennsylvania, where Trump is planning a major effort, union households provided Obama more than half his net margin.

    • Read the whole thing.

    Missing from the analysis: The dead certainty that Hillary will not do as well among black voters as Obama did. But that’s an analysis for another day…

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

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    This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2016 at 8:01 AM and is filed under Democrats, Elections, unions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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