“I look in Iowa along the Mississippi River, where you have all these blue-collar people, John McCain and Mitt Romney didn’t communicate to those people, they did not relate,” says Craig Robinson, the former political director for the Iowa Republican Party and founder of The Iowa Republican website. “Trump, even with some of the problems his campaign has, I think he speaks to those people and they come into play. With his populist message and getting tough with companies that outsource, he has a market, and it is a market the GOP has struggled with.”
While acknowledging that potential appeal, other analysts in both parties believe Trump would face formidable obstacles in seeking to tip these metal-bending states back toward the GOP. Though the Rust Belt battlegrounds have been less affected by demographic change than more rapidly growing states across the Sunbelt, they have not been immune to it: In all of them, the share of the vote cast by non-college whites has declined over the past quarter century, while the share represented by college-educated whites and minorities has increased. And even if Trump can overcome the consistent tendency of working-class whites in these states to give Democrats slightly more of their votes than they do elsewhere, he faces the risk that the same hard-edged agenda and style that has electrified so many blue-collar white men will drive away other voters. That list could include not only Democratic-leaning groups like Millennials, minorities, and socially-liberal white-collar whites, but also working-class white women, who usually tilt mostly toward the GOP.
“The limits on this strategy include the countervailing effect among college-educated voters, Millennials and minorities,” said the long-time Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, who first became prominent for his studies of Michigan working-class whites. “But it may be equally important that half of the working class [i.e., women] are put off by him.”
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