The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Young, educated voters learn to love ‘toxic’ Trump
New voters flocking to the GOP front-runner will make him a fearsome contender in the election
In the Goat Bar and Grill in downtown Manchester, New Hampshire, the local Republicans were having a blast.
It was only a Monday night. But with a primary vote the following day, spirits were high. On stage, Scott Brown, the former Republican senator, sang hits by Led Zeppelin and Skid Row. Between covers, he reached for a crowd-pleasing line.
“Let’s bring inflation down,” he said, to screeches of approval. “Let’s bring down mortgage rates so our kids can get on the property ladder.”
The bar’s screens, usually reserved for sport, were tuned to Fox News. One attendee in his mid-sixties cruised the room in a t-shirt that simply read: “Trump’s the best. F— the rest.”
Perched at the bar, 21-year-old Rebecca Awad was among a handful of women in the room, and brought down its average age by some years. It appeared she had walked into this eccentric scene by mistake.
As a Gen-Z Lebanese immigrant, she is one of the last people one would expect to find at a GOP election party.
“I’m voting for Trump,” she said. “I just agree with most of his ideas. I feel like he’s good for America, and I feel like he’ll be great in office. I think he will make America great again, especially our economy. I feel like he could fix it.”
If Rebecca’s support for the former president feels unusual, it isn’t. She is one of millions of young, collegeeducated voters who have decided to take a chance on Donald Trump.
No longer toxic Trump?
The results in New Hampshire show a surprising change in American voting habits since 2016, when Mr Trump first swept to victory.
Moderate, secular and wealthy, the state should have been a walkover for Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who has become the sole Republican alternative to Mr Trump.
As an open primary state, it also allows independent voters to cast a ballot in either the Republican or Democratic contest, injecting more than a hundred thousand extra votes into the mix and, in theory, boosting more moderate candidates.
Mrs Haley spent months and more than $30million building her campaign there. Mr Trump, with his busy schedule of court appearances, barely turned up. It was Mrs Haley’s best shot at an early win.
But on Tuesday’s results night, support for Mr Trump was higher than ever. Digging into the data, the surge in non-traditional Trump voters backing the front-runner goes some way to explaining his win.
While Mr Trump performed best with strongly conservative voters, white evangelicals and those without a college degree, he also saw significant growth among more unexpected groups. Half of all women voted for him, up from a third in the 2016 New Hampshire primary, along with 58 per cent more voters under 29.
His support among non-graduates increased the most, but voters with degrees were also more sympathetic than during his last primary campaign, along with non-white voters.
How Trump turned things around
While Mrs Haley has vowed to fight on to South Carolina on Feb 24, the race appears to be over. The latest surveys from Republicans in South Carolina show Trump outstrips her by more than 30 points. Nationally, around three quarters of Republicans say they will vote for him.
The remarkable change in fortunes for Trump is a result of his own tenacity on the campaign trail.
“I’m the largest real estate developer in New York,” Mr Trump said in a pilot episode of The Apprentice that aired 20 years ago this month.
“But it wasn’t always so easy,” he added. “About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back and I won, big league. I used my brain. I used my negotiating skills. And I worked it all out. Now my company’s bigger than it ever was — it’s stronger than it ever was.”
With minor edits to the content, and the addition of even more dubious spray tan, the clip could have been issued this week. A year ago, with a mounting series of legal headaches, Mr Trump had been all but written off.
No former president had ever been indicted by a criminal court. Only one former president had ever been voted out of office and returned in a subsequent election.
Against the odds, Trump turned his legal challenges into a campaign tool. “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way,” he said, after receiving his first federal indictment in June. The line has since become one of his favourites.
Trump’s MAGA base rallied to his defence. By the end of last year, his approval ratings had increased by almost 10 points. But while Trump has reactivated his base, built in the lead-up to the 2016 election, the addition of new voters is a more recent phenomenon.
Make the economy great again
The latest data shows it is among the groups where Mr Trump had the least support in 2016 where his numbers have risen the most. They include women, ethnic minorities, moderates, graduates and millennials.
Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said much of Mr Trump’s appeal to new supporters can be explained by his strong performance on the economy, while the Biden administration has been plagued by persistent inflation.
Polling for The Telegraph conducted last month found that in six key swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Florida – the economy was voters’ top priority and the one on which they trusted Mr Biden the least. In all six states, voters said they thought Mr Trump would be more likely to improve their financial position.
“Inflation is such a powerful indicator, that the fact that they see
Trump as better able to handle the economy may at least be a partial explanation for the fact that he’s doing better among these groups than he did in 2016.”
This explanation may be especially true for women, who generally visit grocery stores more frequently, and are more likely to manage household finances, she said.
“Trump has to hope that the economy is going to be the issue in the [autumn], because he’s really seen as much stronger on that than Biden, and that could help him move a lot of groups his way.”
The economy is also a major issue for young voters, likely to be concerned about job security, the cost of housing and student loans. A poll published last month found Trump leading Biden by 49 per cent to 43 per cent among voters aged 18 to 29. In 2020, Biden won that age group by 24 points.
Many young voters are expected to either switch sides, stay at home or choose no-hope third candidates. That trend could make all the difference in crucial swing states.
Trump is also making progress with young people who are motivated by debates on abortion. Mr Trump has not expressed support for a nationwide abortion ban, which Ms Bowman said may help to soften young people and female graduates’ stance on Mr Trump.
“He doesn’t want to be seen as an extreme on the issue of Roe v Wade, and that too could solve the problems that he’d have with college educated women in particular,” she said.
Trump 2.0 in office
In office, the need to placate Congress requires presidents to be conciliatory, building consensus and passing bills in their first term to ensure they are reelected for another four years.
Trump, who can only serve one more term, does not have this constraint. Nor does he have concerns about upsetting moderate Republicans in Congress, having largely transformed the congressional wing of the GOP and won over its leadership, including Mike Johnson, the new House Speaker.
Trump has also learned from his first term and intends to bring back many of the policies that were blocked last time by the civil service – known to his supporters as creatures of “the swamp”.
It was not until the last year of his first presidency that Trump introduced Schedule F, a controversial executive order that gave him the power to gut the federal workforce, sacking employees that obstructed his policy plans and replacing them with loyalists. The order was ultimately mired in legal challenges, before being overturned in the first days of the Biden administration.
Trump has said he would immediately reintroduce it, in what he described in his first campaign rally in March as “retribution” against the “deep state”. He has also pledged to bring back strict border control policies including “ideological screening” for immigrants, and to use the Justice Department as a political tool against his enemies – replicating the way he claims he has been treated in the last three years.
On foreign policy, he has been more
‘Inflation is such a powerful indicator, the fact that they see Trump as better on economy may be a partial explanation for why he’s doing better’
explicit, promising to end the war in Ukraine “in one day”, in what has been interpreted as a call for territorial negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv. He has strongly hinted that he would have no qualms about leaving Nato, effectively destroying the alliance.
Mr Trump has also repeatedly promised to “drill, baby, drill” – borrowing a slogan from Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor – and scrap current incentives for Americans to buy electric cars.
Unlike most politicians, however, it appears Mr Trump does not intend to campaign on policy. He intends to campaign on being Donald Trump.
The former president’s gains among unexpected portions of the American electorate show that his remarkable force of personality can overcome extraordinary hurdles. As his campaign continues, he has produced one of the most valuable commodities in politics: a sense of inevitability.
A year ago, Americans looked at the former president’s plans for a second stint in the White House and asked each other, ‘Could Donald Trump really win?’
Now, the question is: can Donald Trump lose?