Why Republicans and independents are voting for Trump
March 8
Ken Bickers
As Donald Trump continues to rack up primary wins and has a solid led in
two new polls of Michigan Republicans leading into todays’ primary there, a
few of the questions the Republican establishment and rivals are asking is
who is voting for him and why? Ken Bickers, professor of political science at
the University of Colorado Boulder, thinks he has the answer.
CUT 1 (448) “This is not just the sort of regular Republicans that always vote
deciding that they are going to go a Trump candidate this time and not one
of these other folks. (501) Trump is taping into the people that have felt
disaffected from American politics. That have felt left behind – not just by the
Republican Party but also by the Democratic Party.” (513)
And Bickers points out he is bringing these voters out in large numbers,
something other Republican presidential candidates couldn’t do in the past
presidnetial elections.
CUT 2 (420) “Trump is bringing out tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands
of voters that have not voted in the past. (429) If you look at the voter
turnout levels on the Republican side, contest after contest, the turnout rates
are huge. (438) In some places they’re up double over what they were four
years ago. And even higher than what they were in 2008 by very large
margins.”
And who are these disaffected voters? Bickers says some are independents
while others remind him of a class of voters who were once the core of the
Democratic party many years ago.
CUT 3 (519) “A lot of these people fit the profile of folks that I would’ve
describe as part of the core constituency of the Democratic Party coming out
of he New Deal - (528) working class; unlikely to have college degrees; bluecollar jobs; mostly married; kids that they’re struggling to get them to college
or want them to go to college; paying on mortgages; that like to hunt and
fish and watch sports. (555) And those people are not in the profile of the
Democratic Party anymore. They used to be. That was the white working class
and the Republican Party has struggled to appeal to those people.” (606)
Bickers says every so often in American politics someone new with a different
message comes on to the scene and that can be very appealing to voters –
especially voters tired of politics as usual.
CUT 4 (621) “So something is new in American politics and Donald Trump is,
believe it or not, the person that represents that new thing in American
politics. And the establishment Republicans are going crazy trying to figure
out hot to control it, contain it, divert it, move it back into more confortable
channels and they are not being very successful at that.” (650)
There are three primaries and one caucus on slate for today with 150
delegates at stake. Michigan offers the most delegates with 59. As of
yesterday afternoon, Trump lead in two polls in that state by a fairly sizeable
margin – 39 percent to 24 percent over Ted Cruz in the CBS survey and 41
percent to 22 percent for Cruz in the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll.
-CU-