The focus groups that provide the most revealing reactions to Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency may be the thousands of front-door conversations held every month around the country by canvassers for the liberal organizing group Working America. Those encounters suggest Democrats could reap big gains in 2018—but are still facing big questions about their position against the president in 2020...
Working America was among the first liberal organizations to resurrect the old technique of contacting voters through door-to-door organizing, rather than using the direct-mail and television-advertising campaigns that had dominated activism after the 1970s. And it dispatched its organizers to working-class communities where few voters ever heard from liberal groups. Karen Nussbaum, the group’s founding director, says that when it compared its 3 million members with the membership lists of other major progressive organizations, it found that 90 percent of its people didn’t belong to any of the other groups. “No one is talking to these folks,” she says.
In more affluent and better-educated communities, he says, voters are heavily consuming news about the daily maelstroms engulfing Trump. The perpetual chaos and conflict, he says, is powerfully energizing the college-educated voters most repulsed by Trump, especially women. And that undertow is so strong that it is tugging others around them away from the GOP: “If you live in a college-educated community, you are moving with that overall community,” Morrison says.
The story is very different in the white working-class areas that powered Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory. There, amid daily economic strain, the drama filling cable news is like a distant shout in the wind. “In working-class communities, this whole thing still doesn’t fecking matter,” he says. “What’s happening with the [Pittsburgh] Steelers: That’s more top of mind than Trump’s latest tweet.”
This engagement deficit creates an opening for Democrats in November because they could tilt the electorate’s composition away from the GOP.
