Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:01 pm
Donald Trump is picking a white man as his running because he thinks that it is going to be easy to beat Hillary Clinton so he doesn’t[ need a minority or woman VP. In other words, Trump just slammed the door shut on reversing the damage that he has done with women and minority voters.
Howard Fineman at HuffPo laid out the Trump campaign’s flawed thinking that will doom the GOP:
He may moderate a few views — think Muslims — but he won’t and doesn’t need to back down on anything. He probably won’t pick a woman or a member of a minority group as a running mate because that would be “pandering.†He won’t win George W. Bush’s levels of Latino support, but he will pick up enough Hispanic votes in key swing states. He won’t get the Bush family’s support and doesn’t want it. Trump just has to be presidential enough in the first debate (no body parts mentioned), pick an experienced running mate, and run Clinton into the ground as a corrupt version of Barack Obama.
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He’ll win with white men and women, plus just enough of everyone else. Simple.
The reason why Trump will lose with this strategy is that the Republican coalition of older white rural voters without college degrees is shrinking, while more Democratic-leaning African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and other minority voters grew from 12% of the electorate in 1980 to 29% in 2012.
The Trump campaign is pretending like it is 1980, and all he needs to win are white voters. Trump is ignoring the fact that the Republican percentage of the white vote has been increasing, yet the GOP continues to lose presidential elections.
Trump could have taken a big step towards helping his campaign by not selecting a white man, but he is going to probably make the worst possible decision for Republican hopes of victory.
If Donald Trump picks a while male running mate and loses the election, the seeds of his defeat will have been planted by his campaign’s assumption that they could win the White House by only carrying white voters.
Trump is previewing the kind of bad decision making that would make him a disaster of a president.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
