When Donald Trump’s critics caricature him as the leader of an angry mob of archconservative men without college degrees, they’re not wrong. Their portrait is just woefully incomplete.

Yes, Trump is trouncing his rivals through support among men, among self-professed angry voters and among conservatives — but exit polls from 15 nominating contests reveal that his support extends far beyond that, showing Trump making inroads into demographic groups and ideologies thought to be far outside his range of appeal.


The new, more accurate picture of Trump’s supporters reveals why Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have thus far failed to surpass the billionaire’s coalition — and reveals what may be their last, best hope for stopping him.

Here are five myths about Trump’s supporters.

1. “They’re uneducated”

Blue-collar voters certainly make up the bulk of Trump’s large coalition, but he is also doing very well among Republicans with college degrees. In six of the statewide GOP exit polls so far, Trump was the most popular candidate among college-educated voters. In another six, he was their second-place choice. (Only in Oklahoma did Trump fall out of the top two among those with college degrees.) A large number of college Republicans count themselves as Trump supporters as well.

Still, voters without a college education are Trump’s core base of support. More non-college-educated voters than ones with college degrees have supported Trump in every single primary and caucus so far, according to exit polls. In those states, voters without degrees were over 11 percentage points more likely to support Trump, on average. Trump has yet to reach a majority in any state, but he won over 60 percent of blue-collar Republicans in Massachusetts on Super Tuesday, per those exit polls.

2. “They’re superconservative”

Many conservatives love Trump, but they’re not alone — and his appeal spans ideologies in ways his rivals can’t match. Cruz’s support tanks among self-identified moderates, and Rubio struggles for a significant foothold among those who self-identify as very conservative, but Trump’s share of the vote has so far been fairly consistent across ideological boundaries in the exit polls, a result that’s consistent with a host of pre-primary media surveys and other polls this year.

A group of Trump’s voters are particularly motivated by his build-a-wall-and-make-Mexico-pay stance on immigration — he dominates the 10 percent to 20 percent of voters who call that their most important issue in exit polls. But that’s not nearly enough to explain the margins of victory Trump has enjoyed thus far. Instead, emotion, rather than ideology, has been a binding factor in the Trump coalition. He’s consistently winning voters who say they’re “angry” at the federal government. And a study by the RAND Corporation found that GOP voters who agree with the statement that “people like me don’t have any say about what the government does” were 86 percent more likely to support Trump than any other candidate.

3. “They’d hate him if they only knew …”

Until the past few weeks, his adversaries’ main hit on Trump was that he’s a faux conservative: a flip-flopper on abortion, a fan of eminent domain, a longtime donor to Democratic politicians. The thing is, Trump’s supporters are not only untroubled by his smattering of moderate-to-liberal policy positions — many of his backers share them.

Take abortion: Private surveys for other 2016 presidential campaigns (shown to POLITICO on condition that the campaigns wouldn’t be identified) have shown Trump running stronger than his average among Republicans who support abortion rights. That group is almost entirely unrepresented among GOP elected officials (just three Republican House members voted against a recent bill to strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood), but there are a number of GOP voters who don’t mind.

Sure enough, Trump has praised Planned Parenthood — though not abortion — on the Republican debate stage. “When Trump is talking Planned Parenthood, he’s onto something,” Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg said. “Either he has an amazing antenna and instincts, or a pollster is showing him that moderate voters are in a different world” than the rest of the party.

It’s not just social issues. The RAND study found that Trump’s support rose as groups of voters grew more favorable toward labor unions and raising taxes on the wealthy, positions way out of step with Republican orthodoxy but more in keeping with Trump himself.

With the “poseur” attack floundering, super PACs and opponents have refocused in recent weeks on Trump’s business history, especially on those who lost money on “Trump University,” attempting to paint Trump as part of a system that so many of his supporters believe has let them down.

4. “It’s only men”

Like the education gap in Trump’s support shown above, his coalition is gender-skewed, too. More men than women have backed Trump in every exit poll so far, with the gap rising to double digits in some places. (In Alabama, for example, 52 percent of men backed Trump but only 36 percent of women followed suit.)

But Trump has yet to fall below 24 percent support from women in a single state, according to those surveys, and he has climbed above 30 percent support in many of them. Simply put, Trump would not have been able to get this far in the GOP presidential race — 10 state wins and hundreds of delegates — without significant support from female Republican voters.

5. “They’re not serious”

Part of the reason Trump’s candidacy was dismissed by many in 2015 was that many pollsters and analysts did not believe the businessman’s gaudy poll numbers would translate to actual votes in caucuses and primaries. Drive-by political observers and nonvoters were artificially boosting his polls, we were told, and the actual results wouldn’t reflect the surveys.

In fact, Trump built a coalition of supporters with enviable stability. Marco Rubio has won late-deciding voters in many states so far, according to the exit polls. In particular, they powered his comeback second-place finish in South Carolina. But long before those late surges, Trump had already locked up big leads in many of these states because his supporters committed to him long ago.

Half or more of the GOP electorate in every state picked a candidate before the last week of the race there, and those voters have overwhelmingly broken for Trump. He has won voters who settled on a candidate a month or more before voting in every contest but Cruz’s home state of Texas. A huge share of Trump’s voters have committed early, stuck with him and then actually turned out to vote, driving record-setting vote totals in nearly every primary and caucus so far.