If you make the assumption—and it’s a good one—that Trump’s appeal is mainly to white voters, does that mean the nation’s diveristy will lock him out of the (name-entirely-coincidental) White House? Not necessarily.
New analysis shows that millions more white, older working-class voters went to the polls in 2012 than was found by exit polls on Election Day. This raises the prospect that Mr. Trump has a larger pool of potential voters than generally believed.
Previous estimates of the racial breakdown of voters were based on exit polls, but by extending the information to include census records, voter registrations and other documents, it now appears that white voters were undercounted by a factor of several million.
At first, this information may seem like an unequivocal boost for Trump.
The wider path may help explain why Mr. Trump is competitive in early general election surveys against Hillary Clinton.
But if the 2012 election actually had millions more white voters than previously thought, there’s another interesting point in that information.
… it calls into question the prevailing demographic explanation of recent elections, which held that Barack Obama did very poorly among whites and won only because young and minority voters turned out in record numbers. …
The data implies that Mr. Obama was not as weak among white voters as typically believed. He fared better than his predecessors among white voters outside the South.
So there may be more white voters, which is being interpreted as more room for a Trump victory. Only … no. Trump voters may be white voters, but that doesn’t make every white voter a Trump voter. The fact is there were more white voters who voted for Obama, which would seem to make them very unlikely allies for Donald Trump.
Exit polling indicated that the 2012 electorate was 72 percent white. These newer studies show that the value may have been as high as 76 percent. That may seem like a small change, but with 131 million voters in that election, 4 percent is more than five million voters. And 4 percent equals President Obama’s margin of victory.
If this whole collection of previously unknown older, whiter, less educated workers were to go for Trump as a block, it could easily be enough to sway the election (assuming Trump’s continuing hate-sprew doesn’t turn the contest into a laugher). But the evidence is that this group isn’t a block.
The biggest thing to take from this information may not be some hidden advantage for Trump, but simply further evidence that exit polls are far, far less accurate than they are often assumed to be.
For Bernard Fraga, a professor of political science at Indiana University, there is “no question that the exit poll is not as accurate.” He added, “It’s clearly much more reliable to look at the C.P.S. or even better to look at the voter file-based work.” Today, virtually all major campaign polling, voter targeting and election law litigation is conducted using voter file data.
The 2012 exit polls indicated surging changes that didn’t actually appear, either in results or in other information. We’ve already seen significant errors in the data returned from exit polls in the 2016 primaries. Neither campaigns nor analysts should treat the exit polls as anything other than that — polls, not ground truth.
The best news out of all this? White Americans were more willing to vote for a black president than the story we’ve been told over the last eight years. That’s worth a cheer.