An analysis released Tuesday by two think tanks shows how Donald Trump could win The White House with a single-digit increase in the share of the white vote.
If the non-white vote for Democrats remains the same and Trump gains four more percent of the white vote, he would flip eight states that President Barack Obama carried in 2012, The New York Times reports.
The study was done jointly by the Brookings Institution and The American Enterprise Institute. The Republican Party’s autopsy after the 2012 election showed that the GOP presidential nominee should moderate his tone on immigration and social issues in order to win over voters.
Trump has eschewed this method, all while increasing turnout in the primaries. He has instead appealed to working-class whites with a economic nationalist pitch denouncing free trade deals and open-borders.
Non-white voters are increasing, while whites are dying out. Obama was able to use this to his advantage in 2012 winning, despite Romney gaining 59 percent share of the white vote. (RELATED: Census Report Shows Majority Of Americans Under Age Five Are Minorities)
This is near record amounts. President Reagan received 60 percent of the white vote in 1984. What Trump would need to do is increase the white vote share in states such as New Hampshire, where Obama won 51 percent of that demographic in 2012.
By increasing his share of the white vote by four percentage points in Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida, Trump would take those Obama states.
A key point here in the non-white vote share remaining the same. Democrats are already preparing to use Trump’s rhetoric against him and turn out Hispanic voters out in droves. (RELATED: Soros To Spend Millions On ‘Immigrant Voters Win PAC’)
The New York real estate developer could hedge against this increase of Latino voters by securing a larger portion of black votes than Republican candidates have previously gotten. In 2012, Mitt Romney only got 7 percent of support from this demographic. The best a Republican has done was Reagan with 14 percent in 1980.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz has previously said, “If [Trump] were the Republican nominee he would get the highest percentage of black votes since Ronald Reagan in 1980.”
If the vote share between races and genders remains the same in 2016 as it did in 2012, Democrats are poised to win with 51.5 percent.