Trump’s Testosterone Wall

Men and the Republican base are keeping the president afloat in the election.

In his almost four years as president, Donald Trump has never tried to be a president for all Americans. He has governed with his eye on his base, without attempting to build bridges, prioritizing his political interests over the collective ones. General James Mattis, secretary of defense for two of the president’s four years in office and a Republican, went as far as saying, “Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try.”

According to the first exit polls, that policy has manifested itself in Tuesday’s preliminary results. To a large extent, if Trump has stayed afloat, it is due to the overwhelming support of his party and of — mainly white — men, although he has scraped up some support among Black and Hispanic men.

Once more, the South, rural states and small cities have proven to be his lifeline: the America that is most fearful of social change, the one that feels good when Trump appeals to the glories of their most injudicious past and when he repeatedly tells them that they are the backbone of the country — however much the economic growth has passed them by and left them by the wayside.

Hard-Core Supporters of Trumpism

However, not everyone in his base has kept on blindly believing his promises and his mostly failed attempts to renegotiate a business relationship with the world or restore industrial vigor to those areas betrayed by automation and the bazaar of globalization. According to CNN’s exit polls, the president would face an 11-point loss of support compared with 2016 among white men without college degrees — those workers who still constitute the hard-core supporters of Trumpism.

This is a trend that could be applied to the vote of white men as a whole, through which he has gone on to win by 18 points, as opposed to the 31 from four years ago. To a certain extent, he has made up for it by achieving his best results among Hispanic and Black men, bombarded as they were by millions of negative ads about Joe Biden made by the Trump campaign and his allies, where they accused him, among other things, of having destroyed “millions of African American lives” with his support of Bill Clinton’s incarceration policies.

Women have predominantly continued voting Democratic, giving Biden a 13-point advantage — the same Hillary Clinton obtained. What is striking in CNN’s polls is that women with a higher education have switched sides to back the president, giving him an advantage of one point over his opponent.

Moreover, Trump has managed to turn Republican voters into a watertight stronghold despite the money spent by organizations of disgruntled Republicans such as the Lincoln Project, and despite Biden’s efforts to approach their more moderate cadres. His support has grown from 90 percent in 2016 to 93 percent.

The expected defection on the part of pensioners — those hardest hit by the pandemic — has not taken place, either. It was an issue of secondary importance to Republican voters, who were much more concerned by the economy and safety. Those over the age of 45 are the base of Trumpism, a movement that will not soon disappear, even if the tycoon loses the election.