Can Trump Win? Possible, but Unlikely

October 25th, 2015

Awake Goy

Current US Republican Party presidential nomination frontrunner Donald Trump can only win the race for the White House if an unprecedented two-thirds or more of white Americans turn out to vote for him.

Although theoretically possible, an analysis of racial demographics and voting patterns shows that this feat is unlikely to occur.

Trump-meeting

– The US Census Bureau’s most recent figures claim that whites in the US now make up 62.1 percent of the population (Quickfacts, US Census Bureau). This is most likely an underestimate because of the Census Bureau’s notoriously inaccurate system of racial classification, which relies on “self-identification,” classes all Middle Easterners and North Africans (Arabs and Jews alike) as white, and routinely classes mixed race Hispanics as white.

Even taking the 62.1 percent figure as accurate, however, the steady increase in the nonwhite electorate in the US is reflected in voting patterns of the last few American presidential elections.

– According to a US Census Bureau study paper on the topic, titled “The Diversifying Electorate—Voting Rates by Race and Hispanic Origin in 2012,” since 1996, the number of nonwhites eligible to vote has increased in every presidential election, as has their numbers who have reported voting.

Overall, 133 million people reported voting in 2012, a turnout increase of about 2 million people since the election of 2008.

In comparison to the election of 2008, about 1.7 million additional black voters reported going to the polls in 2012, as did about 1.4 million additional Hispanics and about 550,000 additional Asians.

The number of “non-Hispanic white” voters decreased by about 2 million between 2008 and 2012. Since 1996, this is the only example of a race group showing a decrease in net voting from one presidential election to the next, and it indicates that the 2012 voting population expansion came primarily from nonwhite voters.

Between 1996 and 2012, the black population, the Asian population, and the Hispanic population all saw their shares of the eligible electorate and the voting population increase.

Non-Hispanic whites were the only race group whose shares of the eligible electorate and the voting population did not increase. Between 1996 and 2012, the non-Hispanic white share of the eligible electorate dropped from 79.2 percent to 71.1 percent, and their share of the voting population decreased from 82.5 percent to 73.7 percent.

Overall, in the last five presidential elections, the non-Hispanic white share of total votes cast dropped by about 9 percentage points.

In comparison, between 1996 and 2012, the Hispanic share of total votes cast increased by about 4 percentage points, while the black share increased by about 3 percentage points.

What this means in real terms is that nonwhite voters—those most likely to vote Democrat—now form more than 25 percent of the electorate. In California, the US’s most populous state, nonwhites became a majority of the population in 1999, and in 2014, became an outright majority of all eligible voters in that state.

– Similar patterns have occurred in other highly populated states, a study of the racial demographic impact on voting patterns published by the Center for American Progress in January 2015 revealed.

According to that study (“The Changing Face of America’s Electorate,” January 6, 2015):

Since 2012, these demographic challenges have only grown more acute. As people of color become an ever larger share of states’ electorates, the political implications for both parties comes into even sharper focus: In 2016, to win the presidency—as well as many US Senate races—candidates will need to secure substantial support from voters of color.

By 2016, demographic shifts will be influential in states such as Florida, where voters of color are an increasingly significant share of the electorate, as well as in states such as Ohio, where elections are close and growth among voters of color is rapidly outpacing the growth of the non-Hispanic white electorate.

From North Carolina to Arizona, populations of color are becoming a noticeably larger share of the electorate. In Arizona, voters of color made up 32.4 percent of all eligible voters in 2012. By 2016, this share will reach 35.6 percent, with Latinos making up 23 percent of the Arizona electorate alone. In other states, voters of color have not reached the point of being a significant share of the overall electorate, but they will still represent the majority of the net increase in eligible voters between 2012 and 2016.

In Pennsylvania, for example, people of color made up 17 percent of the electorate in 2012 and will rise to 19.2 percent by 2016.The growth of this electorate represents 87 percent of the net increase in eligible voters in the state and therefore may prove to be influential in close presidential and US Senate races in 2016.

In Georgia, people of color made up 38 percent of the electorate in 2012. That number will rise to 41 percent by 2016. This growth is attributable in large part to the increasing size of the Latino electorate, which is on track to make up nearly 6 percent of all eligible Georgia voters by 2016—a nearly 50 percent increase since 2012.

In the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney was widely viewed as the “white” candidate in the contest against Barack Obama’s re-election bid. Although an utterly uninspiring, and even borderline moronic candidate, Romney still polled 54,831,326 of the total “white” vote, or an astounding 59 percent.

Obama on the other hand, polled 36,244,436 (or 39 percent) “white” votes, giving Romney a margin among “white” voters of 18,586,890.

Ignoring the inaccuracies caused by the US Census Bureau’s definition of “white,” the fact remains that Romney would have needed to win two thirds of the “white” vote in 2012 in order to beat Obama.

As outlined above, the increase in nonwhite voters has accelerated since 2012, making the barrier for Trump to win even higher. He needs to poll at the very minimum 66 percent of the European-American vote if he wants to stand any chance of making it into the White House.

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His chances are made even poorer by the complicated electoral system at work in America, where presidents are not elected by direct popular vote majorities, but rather state “electoral colleges” which are based on a “winner takes all basis.” This means that even losing a state vote by a few hundred votes consigns the pro-Trump vote in that state to the trash can.

This means that Trump must win an outright majority of the votes in the most populous states at the very minimum to get a majority of “electoral college” votes—and, as pointed out, the most populous states are those which are now majority nonwhite, or close to that status.

While it is therefore theoretically possible for Trump to pull off such a near miracle—by getting the millions of white non-voters out to the polls for the first time—it will not be easy without an unprecedented mass grassroots effort and a never-before-seen white racial voting pattern.

Realistically, the chances of that happening are slight.