Exit polling by Edison Research on behalf of the National Election Pool conducted on Tuesday revealed the cultural and political shift taking place in the United States. Simply put, secular white voters are finding a home in the Democratic Party while minorities — Blacks and Hispanics primarily — are increasingly comfortable supporting Republicans.
Based on more than 7,700 in-person interviews at 115 polling places across the country and nearly 5,000 telephone interviews with voters, the results were startling to CNN. Wrote staff journalist Zachary Wolf: “Democrats were hoping for a landslide and didn’t get it.… Turnout far exceeded 2016 but that didn’t signal a blue tidal wave as some Democrats expected. Rather, Trump’s supporters kept pace, defending the President from Democrats motivated to defeat him.”
The president won both Florida and Texas thanks to newfound support from Latino voters. Trump won three of 10 minority votes compared to winning just two of 10 in 2016. Edison’s national poll showed that about 11 percent of African Americans, 31 percent of Hispanics and 30 percent of Asian Americans voted for Trump on Tuesday, up three full percentage points from 2016 in all three groups.
Erick Woods Erickson, a conservative evangelical blogger at The Resurgent, wrote that he has been predicting the change but it is happening more rapidly now:
For the last decade I have been saying … that we were headed towards realignment as black and Hispanic voters leave the Democratic Party and secular white people move to the Democrats. This is really happening now….
In Florida, Hispanic voters and young black men handed Donald Trump the state [while] in Texas … working-class white voters and Hispanic voters saved the GOP….
The Republican Party is becoming a coalition of working-class white voters, young black men, and Hispanic voters.
The ideological chasm between the two parties is illustrated by how those voters view their parties, according to Erickson:
The data overwhelmingly shows these voters are going with the GOP over jobs and education for their kids [while] the policies of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are anathema to these voters….
Donald Trump may win or lose, but the progressive agenda got slaughtered at the ballot box last night. The GOP will most likely keep the Senate. The House GOP has defied all the odds and picked up seats. Even the GOP did not expect that.
In addition, wrote Erickson, the mainstream media’s polling bias may wind up destroying the industry:
Increasingly it is clear the polling industry is not going to survive. Also, I think the traditional media is probably going to die off too. It is clear that the American press has lost touch with those they supposedly report on.
In retrospect Election Day 2020 is likely to prove to be a watershed moment as the American voter finds his voice much differently than he did just a few years ago.
