Can Hillary Clinton tap into Donald Trump's support base?
Donald Trump is a populist. That adjective might have once seemed like a surprising one to use for the New York billionaire, but polling shows it’s become increasingly hard to refute – and Hillary Clinton’s team are starting to study the numbers to understand why.
In New Hampshire, where Trump crushed his opponents with more than twice as many votes as anyone else, exit polls revealed 50% of voters wanted the next president to “be from outside the political establishment”. No surprises then that this is also a state where Bernie Sanders easily beat Clinton.
Trump’s outsider status helps explain why the candidate has continued to defy expectations. Each time data analysts have written off Trump’s chances, they’ve failed to calculate his ability to deepen his support among existing supporters while at the same time broadening his demographic base. Hillary Clinton’s team can no longer afford to make the same mistake. An article in the New York Times this week claimed that “Democrats are poring over polling data to understand the roots of Mr. Trump’s populist appeal”.
So what exactly does Trump’s current support base look like, and how does it compare to Hillary’s? The last major poll to look into this was conducted by CNN and ORC between 24-27 February and had 1,001 respondents. The results show that Trump supporters are more likely to be white, male and live in rural parts of America – and that the exact reverse is true for Clinton’s support base.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/datablog/2016/mar/04/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-support-base-us-election-2016
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