Just four months from the November elections, can Trump keep his winning coalition alive and secure a second term?
In the winter of 2017, days after the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, a fellow reporter traveling near Phoenix, Arizona, told me about a meeting with an elderly couple in a rural diner.
Like every winter, the couple had driven hundreds of miles from their home in Nebraska to enjoy the warm sunshine of Arizona. But this year, their mood was brighter.
Trump was the first presidential candidate they had supported since Ronald Reagan in 1984. This couple, like thousands of others who backed Trump in 2016, didn’t even register in the pre-election polling because they hadn’t voted in over 30 years.
The couple was representative of two demographic groups that helped Trump win in 2016. The first was non-college-educated white Americans, who defied conventional wisdom by favoring a millionaire real estate tycoon over Hilary Clinton by more than 30 percentage points. The second group consisted of seniors, generally a more conservative group of voters, who tilted to Trump by eight percentage points.
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