College graduates continue to criticize Trump’s crude way of doing politics, but it seems they are reconciled to him, as now they consider him to be the victim of a political-judicial conspiracy to exclude him from the electoral race.
In 2016, when Donald Trump surprisingly won the presidential election, the American press was accused of failing to understand what was going on in the country; they were blind to the discontent of the marginalized, the “forgotten men,” because the press was only used to covering the educated wealthy, almost always college graduates. That is to say, the majority of its audience. People with little inclination to root for the real estate developer who had entered politics.
Since then, Trump has never been popular among college graduates who are tired of his rudeness, of his tendency to trivialize even the most complicated issues with an onslaught of slogans, and blessed with the intellectual power to pick out the many lies scattered through the former president’s diatribes.
Even this, too, now seems to be changing in his favor. According to Suffolk University in Boston and USA Today, which ran the same survey one year apart, in January 2022, 76% of conservative graduates supported Trump’s policies but wanted a different president to carry them out, while now, 60% want The Donald back in the White House.
A different survey, this time from Fox News, reached similar conclusions: support for Trump doubled (to 60%) in the previous year among white Republican college graduates. The national surveys, often based on limited samples, should be viewed with some caution. However, Iowa’s outcome is already an initial confirmation. Trump won an absolute majority thanks in part to the support of the college-educated voters who should have represented the core of Nikki Haley’s supporters, allowing her to break through.
Why this change? College graduates continue to criticize Trump’s crude way of doing politics, but it seems they are reconciled to him, as now they consider him to be the victim of a political-judicial conspiracy to exclude him from the electoral race. A problem for Haley, but Joe Biden should also take note: the trials, which the White House asserts should be exposing Trump’s crimes, for the moment, are earning him sympathy among the most cultivated (and presumably moderate) conservatives. Pollsters pinpoint the exact moment when the wind changed in Trump’s favor: March 30, 2023.
It was the day the grand jury first indicted Trump for paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels using campaign finances.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.