This is fascinating. Best use of the Pew survey I have seen in years.
Trump knows exactly what he is doing.
It's a disaster for the future of the Republican Party in a diverse USA.
Reminds me of the hostile takeovers in the movie "Wall Street."
Purchase a struggling institution, strip it of all relevance, make a profit, ditch it.
What Donald Trump Understands About Republicans
Thomas B. Edsall - New York Times
Donald Trump’s success is no surprise. The public and the press have focused on his defiant rejection of mannerly rhetoric, his putting into words of what others think privately. But the more important truth is that a half-century of Republican policies on race and immigration have made the party the home of an often angry and resentful white constituency — a constituency that is now politically mobilized in the face of demographic upheaval.
He taps into the too much change too fast crowd. The resentful white conservative who imagine America once has a Golden Era, in about 1954.
Trump is going directly after those Republican voters who seek to protect what some scholars call “compositional amenities” – the comfort of a common religion and language, mutually shared traditions, and the minimization of cultural conflict.
The territory Trump has ventured onto is fertile ground for his brand of demagoguery.
But once he is done with his adventure in fame and politics, he will dump the resentful and they will have nobody.
To voters who see the world this way, Trump offers the promise that he can restore a vanished America, that he can “make America great again,” as his campaign puts it. Trump clearly finds this endeavor personally gratifying, even as his odds of winning the nomination remain slim. To his followers, the letdown of defeat could be brutal, leaving them stranded, without a candidate who can successfully capture the intensity of their beliefs.
The entire analysis is worth a read. Dives deep into the polling numbers on race and politics.