New polling data is showing that former President Donald Trump maintains a commanding lead over his opponent among white, working-class voters. According to a Pew Research/SSRS survey published this week, 60% of white voters with some or no college education are backing Trump, while 33% are backing Vice President Kamala Harris, yielding a 27-point lead for Trump. Trump’s lead among rural voters is even greater: 60% to 31%, making for a 29-point lead. This follows a New York Times/Siena poll published last week, which found that Trump maintains his double-digit lead among white, working-class voters in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
“The non-college white voting bloc is important for two reasons: first, because, at 42% of the overall electorate, it’s huge, and second, because they’re highly concentrated in the battleground states that will determine who is sworn in in January 2025 — states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin,” FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter commented to The Washington Stand. He continued, “Like most voters, they want to keep more of their hard-earned money, so naturally they want inflation to come down and less taxation. Where they differ from college-educated voters is that uncontrolled, mass immigration from the third world is connected to the economy for them.” He added, “An open southern border is a direct threat to their ability to win contracts and see their wages increase, and to afford housing.”
Inflation and immigration have, respectively, been ranked by voters as the top two issues of concern heading into November’s elections. Trump has been particularly focusing on Harris’s political record during his campaign, noting that Harris and her current boss, incumbent President Joe Biden, are responsible for skyrocketing inflation rates, heightened cost of living, and rampant illegal immigration and related crime.
“Exit polling showed that Trump won 64% of this key demographic in 2016, and 65% in 2020,” Carpenter observed. “It stands to reason the Trump campaign will have to do better among this demographic than 60% if they want to repeat the 2016 sweep in the states that have high concentrations of non-college white voters.”
While the Pew Research survey shows Trump with a commanding lead among white, working-class voters, it also shows the former president statistically tied with Harris nationally. However, numerous statisticians and political observers have warned that mainstream polling firms are intentionally over-sampling Democrats in their polling, in order to artificially inflate support for Harris. Former Republican congressional candidate David Giglio took a series of YouGov/The Economist polls as an example, noting that the firm’s “last poll was a D+6 and produced a Harris +2. A week later, they had to overrepresent to D+10 to maintain a Harris +2.”
He commented, “This is intentional manipulation to produce a desired result.” Author and investigative reporter Mike Cernovich observed that pollsters claiming that Trump should drop out of the presidential race or risk “pull[ing] down the entire ticket” made the same claims in 2016, when Trump bested then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, despite polls showing more support for Clinton. “How can people forget that media always does this?” Cernovich asked. “Stop acting like it’s your first election cycle!”
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
