Could Donald Trump Win the General Election? - The New Yorker

Could Donald Trump Win the General Election? - The New Yorker

"In conversation, Teixeira began by reviewing some figures that he and his colleagues have put together. Between 1976 and 2012, the percentage of white voters in the U.S. electorate declined from eighty-nine per cent to seventy-four per cent. In 2016, that number is likely to fall another two per cent, Teixeira said. That means the minority vote will rise from twenty-six per cent to twenty-eight per cent. About half of that increase reflects the growing Hispanic population; the other half is accounted for by rising numbers of Asians and peoples of other ethnicities.

Despite his occasional protestations to the contrary, Trump would be relying heavily on white voters in a general election. Since they still represent close to three-quarters of the electorate, it appears to be mathematically possible for him to win a majority. Potentially, he could win by increasing turnout in predominantly white areas, winning over Reagan Democrats, and bringing in enough new voters to overcome the unfavorable demographic trends facing the G.O.P. Arguing along these lines, some analysts have raised the possibility that Trump could sweep the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and also flip a Democratic state in the Upper Midwest, either Wisconsin or Minnesota or both. A Trump rampage across the Rust Belt would transform the electoral map—it could even allow him to reach two hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College without carrying Florida, which is usually a pivotal state. “Don’t laugh,” Zach Carter and Ryan Grim, of the Huffington Post, wrote last month. “Donald Trump could actually win this thing.”