Telegraph: 5 key groups paving Trump’s way to the White House

The Telegraph newspaper said that opinion polls show that the chances of the candidates in the US elections are close, which means that a small number of voters could hand over the keys to the White House to the Republican candidate Donald Trump or his Democratic rival Kamala Harris.

The Telegraph newspaper identified 5 areas that it considered key, and said that Trump needs to target them to win the elections, referring to the people who represent them as follows:

Arizona turned blue for the first time in two decades in 2020, the Telegraph reported, but Democrats can’t count on it, because the key area here is Maricopa County, which makes up more than half the state’s voters and has nearly a million people who still support Trump, as do Clark County and Washoe County in Nevada, which Democrats won in 2020 but by a smaller margin than in 2016.

These counties are linked, according to the Telegraph, to a large and growing Hispanic community, which reached 32% in the latest census, and leans Democratic, amounting to a tenth of the country’s voters, and they are the ones who gave current US President Joe Biden a comfortable majority of 61% in 2020, according to Catalyst.

But the same research also showed an 8-percentage point shift toward Trump between 2016 and 2020 among this group, and he leads on immigration by a 42% to 37% margin among Hispanic voters, with Arizonans, who see immigration as a top issue, supporting Trump by 89%.

Trump lost Georgia, which has a quarter of the population in rural votes, to Biden by the narrowest margin in 2020, and he will need to build on his advantage with that demographic, especially since he dominated the rural vote nationwide in 2020 by 25 points, but he also needs to make further inroads in the state.

The Telegraph reported that the issues raised are in Trump’s favor, as rural voters support Trump twice as much as they support Harris, regarding economic policy and immigration.

As for abortion, which is one of the top three issues, voters are almost evenly divided between the two parties.

The Telegraph pointed out that Harris realizes the importance of the rural vote, and indeed embarked on a bus tour of rural counties in August.

Democrats may not be able to win these counties, but they can reduce the margins and help increase the total votes.

Like Georgia, North Carolina, which Trump held in 2020 but whose lead over Democrats dropped to just one point, is a cornerstone of the Black Belt, with African Americans accounting for a third of Georgia’s population.

In 2016, Trump flipped Wisconsin to Republicans for the first time since 1992 by a narrow margin, due to a surge in support from whites, who make up the majority of the state, but it swung back to Democrats in 2020, which could be a problem for Trump.

Like Wisconsin, Michigan was a shock loss for Democrats in 2016 and even when it came back in 2020 the margins were much narrower than expected, especially since this state has roots in the historic auto industry and represents a predominantly manual labor community.

Trump did well with labor unions in 2016, when employment and retirement concerns were key, and in this election inflation and the cost of living will undoubtedly be on their minds.

In Kent County, the state’s largest county outside Detroit, Trump lost his majority in 2016, the seventh time a Republican has lost his majority in 36 elections, and this will be the fifth time Trump has needed to pull this community to win the state.

Pennsylvania is the ultimate swing state with the highest number of electoral votes available, and no Democratic candidate has won the White House without it since 1948.

Trump has consistently performed better with less-educated voters.

In 2020, 54% of voters without college degrees supported him, rising to 66% among white non-college voters, an important group in the second-most white swing state after Wisconsin.

To appeal to the average Pennsylvanian, a candidate would have to appeal to the average person in Erie or Northampton, where about 30 percent of the population is college graduate.

Harris recognizes the need to address the graduate gap and has floated plans to eliminate unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs, perhaps enough to sway a small percentage of voters away from Trump.