No Large Metros
Much more Religious
Way less educated
Less Diverse
I like how this one election gave all you red avatars this massive boner for the fantasy that you are a part of this educated party, or that a college degree is some signal of being a Democrat. If anything, having less than a high school degree is the only thing we can definitively, election after election, tie to your voters.
Trends matter, and trends are what this thread is about. The education trend existed before 2016. Obama performed considerably better among the well-educated than Democrats had before, and Trump (IIRC, you didn't vote for him) as the current GOP leader has accelerated that trend. As long as the Republicans are lead by the Trumpsters, they won't be the thinking man's party. Trump is not Ford, let alone Lincoln.
Maybe Democrats still lead among high school dropouts, but Hillary also carried postgraduate voters by a large margin. The Democrats' favorable correlation with voters' increased education increases when looking at white voters alone.
2016 may be just one election, but I'm not sure Republicans will be able to shed their association with Donald Trump so easily in the near future.
Exactly, and as someone who is the EXACT demographic that is supposedly moving toward the Democratic Party because of a distaste for Trump, I am extremely skeptical - based on my anecdotal real-life experiences - that these folks won't remain loyal downballot Republicans and, most likely, Republican voters once Trump is off the ballot.
Depends at how tranformative Trump is as a party leader; looking at how Fox News (which is still the primary source of news for a vast majority of Republicans) is doubling-down on defending him despite his recent scandals and even taking cues from the Alt-Right, I say that by 2024 Trump's style of rhetoric will be par for the course for just about all Republican politicians.
And recent elections in Kansas and Georgia seem to indicate that Republicans have been bleeding down-ballot as well. We will see if Coffman, Roskam and Issa get kicked out in 2018 - that would be the most damning indication that the GOP brand is perpetually damaged in educated suburbs.
