The Atlantic has a good read. Key takeaways (my emphasis):
Central to Trump's 2016 victory was the outsized proportion of non-college-educated whites voting in key states.
Every data source—from the exit polls to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of voter files to studies by Catalist, a Democratic voter-targeting firm—shows that these women reliably cast slightly more than half of all the votes from the white working class.
In 2018, the GOP lost a non-trivial percentage of those women voters. Why? And will they lose even more in 2018, when Trump's back on the ballot?
Women were also more likely than men in the groups to say that Trump’s economy hasn’t delivered improvement for their family, and they were more likely to cite rising health-care and prescription-drug costs as an especially acute squeeze. In both parties, strategists I’ve talked with agree that Democratic promises to defend the Affordable Care Act, particularly its provisions safeguarding patients with preexisting conditions, were crucial to the party’s recovery among blue-collar white women in 2018.
Trump is now caught between a rock and a hard place. His campaign rallies, his life blood, love their chants and one of their new chants is Send Her Back. This chant will probably not increase his already unmitigated support from male supporters but will increasingly alienate a segment of his female supporters. What does he do when they start that chant next time?
Central to Trump's 2016 victory was the outsized proportion of non-college-educated whites voting in key states.
[Trump's] new attacks could nevertheless help him win a second term because the working-class whites believed to be most receptive are overrepresented in the three most crucial states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and, above all, Wisconsin. (In the last state, non-college-educated whites cast fully three-fifths of all votes in 2018, according to the Census Bureau, more than in any other swing state.)
There's a catch though:
Every data source—from the exit polls to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of voter files to studies by Catalist, a Democratic voter-targeting firm—shows that these women reliably cast slightly more than half of all the votes from the white working class.
The women weren’t immune to Trump’s arguments on immigration. In the groups, many agreed with him on two fronts: that there is a crisis at the southern border, and that undocumented immigrants represent an economic threat because they are “willing to work for peanuts,” as one woman put it.
But among the women, those areas of agreement were mitigated by other concerns about Trump, including their belief that, on immigration, “his rhetoric … made him sound ‘racist’ or ‘ignorant,’” as the report notes. “There were a lot of mentions of intolerance in reaction to what he was saying and doing,” Greenberg says.
That recoil represents one component of the broader unease these women expressed about the level of acrimony and division under Trump. While the men almost entirely found ways to justify Trump, the women expressed much more discomfort about the way he talks about race-related issues, his overall style, and whether he respects women. “The women are not making excuses for him...”
These women, who voted for Trump in 2016, evidently care more about everyday issues than the psychological boost of blindly voting for Trump:But among the women, those areas of agreement were mitigated by other concerns about Trump, including their belief that, on immigration, “his rhetoric … made him sound ‘racist’ or ‘ignorant,’” as the report notes. “There were a lot of mentions of intolerance in reaction to what he was saying and doing,” Greenberg says.
That recoil represents one component of the broader unease these women expressed about the level of acrimony and division under Trump. While the men almost entirely found ways to justify Trump, the women expressed much more discomfort about the way he talks about race-related issues, his overall style, and whether he respects women. “The women are not making excuses for him...”
Women were also more likely than men in the groups to say that Trump’s economy hasn’t delivered improvement for their family, and they were more likely to cite rising health-care and prescription-drug costs as an especially acute squeeze. In both parties, strategists I’ve talked with agree that Democratic promises to defend the Affordable Care Act, particularly its provisions safeguarding patients with preexisting conditions, were crucial to the party’s recovery among blue-collar white women in 2018.
