Top Republican officials, who entered the 2016 election cycle intent on broadening the party’s support with a more inclusive message, have been horrified by the success of Donald Trump.

But it turns out that Trump is helping the GOP grow — just not with the kinds of voters they see as critical to the party’s long-term success.


Republicans smashed turnout records in the four states that voted in February, the last three of which Trump won resoundingly. Overall, turnout in the first four states is up nearly 28 percent from 2012 — including a more than 50 percent jump in Iowa and a 128 percent surge in Nevada on Tuesday night.

Democratic turnout, meanwhile, is down about 23 percent from 2008 levels across the first three states — all battleground states in the general election.

Trump crowed in his Nevada victory speech on Tuesday night that he “won Hispanics,” but according to surveys of voters as they entered caucuses or exited polling places, his coalition is made up mostly of whites — specifically, less-educated members of an increasingly disaffected working class.

“I love the poorly educated,” Trump exclaimed from the stage in Las Vegas as he ticked off the highlights of his entrance poll numbers.

And the poorly educated love Trump right back. In his three resounding victories — New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — Trump has racked up huge margins among white voters who don’t have college degrees, running about 10 percentage points ahead of his overall total.

In the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, he won 42 percent of white non-degreed vote. In Nevada, he won a majority of those caucus-goers, 52 percent, according to the entrance poll.

Although Trump’s campaign style often seems improvisational, he has specifically targeted these voters, holding rallies in depressed towns where unemployment rates are above the national average and his message is more likely to resonate: places like Mobile, Alabama, and Beaumont, Texas. On Monday, Trump’s plane will land in Georgia but not in Atlanta, where more than half the state’s population is located. Instead, he’ll visit Georgia’s southern edge, in Valdosta, a town of 56,000 where the median annual income is just under $30,000.

Trump’s coalition — which has him in a commanding position at this early stage of the campaign — isn’t exclusively these working-class voters. While the vast majority of GOP caucus-goers and primary voters thus far have been white, Trump has done well mostly across the board. He won the small subsample of Latinos in Nevada on Tuesday night, with a percentage roughly equal to what Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz got combined. He’s edged Cruz among born-again, evangelical voters in South Carolina and Nevada — despite Cruz’s far-more-frequent invocation of his faith on the trail.

Trump’s best numbers continue to come from downscale voters, however. And his bombastic brand of populist ethno-nationalism is exciting many Republicans, including some who have long voted Democrat or stayed home altogether.

“There’s no question he’s drawing from a number of constituencies,” said Adrian Gray, a Republican pollster and former chief strategist at the Republican National Committee. “I think early on a lot people saw it as this hybrid coalition of working-class whites and people that followed his celebrity. It’s grown significantly beyond that. It’s also changed a little bit.”

But Trump’s shtick may also be further alienating the nonwhites who are the largest source of potential growth in the broader electorate and quite possibly the GOP’s only chance for long-term survival. The billion-dollar question: Which group is larger?

“I don’t think the voters he’ll attract will offset the large numbers of traditional conservative voters who find his character, his policies and his rhetoric deeply offensive,” said Ryan Call, a former Colorado GOP chairman who has been vocal about his party’s need to broaden its appeal to women and Hispanics. “I don’t think at the end of the day, independents, Hispanics, women and college students and the coalition that’s needed to win in a general election will support a Donald Trump candidacy, because it’s not in line with the values of the country.”

Following Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 — the fifth time in the past six elections that the Republicans lost the popular vote for president — the RNC went back to the drawing board, crafting a set of recommendations for the party’s candidates and campaigns to bring new voters into the fold.

But the coalition Trump is cobbling together looks little, if anything, like what Republicans envisioned at the start of the election cycle. The RNC “autopsy” outlined specific policy prescriptions — particularly passing comprehensive immigration reform.

“If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence,” the report read. “It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”

The report goes on to warn that failing to embrace immigration reform will reduce the GOP’s appeal “to its core constituencies only.”

But Trump’s rhetoric — deporting the 11 million immigrants without legal status and building a wall between the United States and Mexico, for example — appears tailored just to those constituencies.

One experienced Republican pollster, who asked not to be identified in order to speak freely, won’t credit Trump for the uptick in turnout through the first four contests, which he attributes to the large GOP field and the primary electorate’s deep antipathy toward President Barack Obama. And he isn’t convinced that Trump’s appeal to blue-collar whites is hurting the party’s attempt to reach out to minority voters — yet.

“I don't think it’s being set in stone, I don’t think it’s hurting the party in the long run,” the pollster said. “If he’s the nominee, there has to be some concerns there. He may intensify the base, but in terms of expanding that base, there are going to be some issues.”

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican digital consultant who has worked for George W. Bush and the RNC, mused in a Wednesday-morning tweetstorm that perhaps the GOP autopsy report had gotten things precisely backward:

Stung by 2008 and 2012, GOP political class obsessed with making party more cosmopolitan. But what if it wasn't that at all? — Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) February 24, 2016

One possible response is to the rising minority population is that whites move in the other direction. — Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) February 24, 2016

In fact, this is not only possible, but likely. Republicans win more states with large minority populations than all-white states. — Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) February 24, 2016

If Trump becomes the nominee and gets wiped out in November, Ruffini suggested, the next GOP contender could repackage his approach to make it more broadly palatable:

If Trump doesn't get crushed, if his relative % goes up in places like PA and OH, this will be an argument against making GOP cosmopolitan — Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) February 24, 2016

Trump will be the Goldwater of “white identity politics” and there will be a @dick_nixon in 2020 or 2024 who is more subtle — Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) February 24, 2016

Dems (and some Rs) will cry racism but this will essentially be an explicit counterpoint to Dem strategy of maximizing black/Latino turnout — Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) February 24, 2016

Pollsters caution, however, that Latinos could make up more than 10 percent of the general electorate, and they are overwhelmingly hostile to Trump. What’s more, his seeming success with Nevada Hispanics crumbles on closer inspection.

Tuesday night’s entrance polls do show Trump leading with 45 percent of Latino voters, roughly equal to his statewide vote share.

But of the 1,573 caucus-goers interviewed on Tuesday night, just 132 of them were Hispanic, according to Joe Lenski of Edison Research, which conducted the entrance poll for a consortium of news organizations.

“Since the total turnout was 75,000,” Lenski said, “that means we are estimating that about 6,000 Hispanics caucused [on Tuesday]. That is a very small portion of the voting-age Hispanic population in the entire state of Nevada.”

By contrast, about 16,000 Hispanics participated in the Democratic caucuses in Nevada last Saturday — meaning that Trump won only roughly 1-in-8 Latino voters who participated in either caucus.

That was confirmed by a new Washington Post-Univision poll of Hispanic voters released late Wednesday. It showed Trump in second place, behind Rubio, among Hispanic Republicans, with 22 percent. But that's worse than it appears: Nearly three times as many Latinos said they plan to vote in the Democratic primary than in the GOP race.

“His image is so negative with Hispanic voters, young voters, a lot of the voters that Republicans need to be appealing to,” Gray said.