IS THERE A CULTURAL SHIFT OCCURRING WITHIN WHITE AMERICA?

…Will these DC protesters cause a cultural shift on American voters

The polls continue to show Biden gaining in popular support

It is becoming clear, that unless the former vice president commits giant gaffes over the next 5 months, he will win-out next November.

The latest analysis finds that Trump’s slippage is driven largely by his eroding support among white voters, particularly those that are said to be his base.  In addition, he is seriously slipping with his older white base.  The average of the recent high-quality polls found that Biden’s overall lead over Trump has expanded by 10 points, up from six points earlier this spring.

Specifically, it was found that in this average of polls, Trump’s edge over Biden among non-college-educated white voters has also slipped by 10 points. Biden now leads among those polls by 21 points.  Trump had commanded a 31 point lead among the non-college white voters back in 2016.

As is noted, the shift among this demographic “would be enough to assure Mr. Biden the presidency, given Biden’s considerable strength among white college graduates.”

Indeed, as the polls also point out, white college grads now back Biden by 20 points, up four points from two months ago and up eight points from 2016, when Trump won in part by not losing educated whites by the margins many of us wrongly expected.

Biden also continues to hold an average lead of seven points among American seniors, which is striking amid all this unrest and amid Trump’s bluster about responding with “STRENGTH”

Obviously, according to Trump, none of this was supposed to be happening.

Is this a cultural shift in white America?  I guess we’ll see in November.

One possible reason for all this can be found in the new Post/Schar School Poll: There is a very large shift underway in how white voters view the issues underlying the protests.

Only 35% of Americans overall approve of Trump’s handling of the protests,The Post poll finds.  Meanwhile, 74% support the protests and 69% say the killing of George Floyd shows broader problems in how police treat black Americans.

But please note these findings among whites: Only 39% of them approve of Trump’s approach, while 57% disapprove; 69% of them support the protests; and 68% of them say Floyd’s death reveals systemic police mistreatment of blacks.

In these cases, there’s not a big difference along educational lines:

Also striking: The 69% of Americans who believe the killing represents broader systemic problems represent a 26-point shift since 2014, when only 43% said the same on a comparable question.

Again, the story here is white voters. As The Post’s write-up notes, on this question …The biggest changes are among whites overall (a 33-point shift) and white women (38 points).

That’s a huge shift among whites toward agreement with the core grievances of the protesters. And this is mirrored by other polling, which has found similarly large percentages of whites agreeing with those grievances.

It’s also mirrored on the ground. As Ryan Cooper, national correspondent at TheWeek.com, points out, across the country we’ve seen black protesters joined by whites, including poor and rural ones.

Now, not being too Pollyann-ish here: It remains to be seen what white Americans will be willing to support in terms of specific reforms and in the terms of addressing the deeper, economic inequalities along racial lines that are fueling the underlying anger..

Still, it looks plausible that a broad cultural shift may be underway throughout white America on these issues.  Biden could directly benefit from this if he is perceived as striking a much more sane balance. He has condemned violence while calling for broad reforms to address grievances that large swaths of white America now see as legitimate and demanding of action.

Obviously we cannot know what sort of direct relationship all this has with Trump’s slippage among white voters. But we can at least reasonably speculate that Trump’s demagoguery has failed to shore up his support with them and that their rejection of his basic arguments helps explain why.

This is not a possibility that Trump is capable of entertaining.  He has absolute, unshakable confidence in the potency of his magical reality-bending powers:

It is disgusting that the Buffalo protester that was shoved by Police could be what Trump tweeted.  Trump said the Buffalo protester was an ANTIFA provocateur.  The 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed by the police  and Trump claimed he appeared to scan police communications in order to black out the police equipment.  Trump said: “I watched, he fell harder than he was pushed. He was aiming his scanner. Could be a set up…?”

As Trump’s floating of this despicable conspiracy theory shows, it is highly unlikely he can be persuaded to even ask himself whether his magical demagoguery might be failing him.

So this Trump derangement will obviously continue.

But, with some signs show that the protests are settling into a calmer, more quietly longer-term posture.  This Trump nonsense will likely make him continue to look more unhinged and out of touch, including looking this way among most white voters.

Now you must just watch how Trump’s new fence is a  sign-of-the-times surrounding the front of the White House.  It has started transforming into, “protest art”.

US officials, under Trump’s orders, had erected an eight-foot-tall fence around the public square in front of the White House.  The American people have since turned it into a wall of artistic relief achieved by last week’s protesters.

Copyright G. Ater 2020