But because Trump extends his budget cuts so deeply and broadly through income-support programs, the reductions still inevitably reach many of the lower-income and less-educated whites that have emerged as the cornerstone of the modern Republican coalition. The large number of GOP-leaning voters who rely on programs Trump would retrench underscores the difficulty his party faces in reconciling their ideological drive to shrink government spending with the material needs of their increasingly working-class and older white supporters. Not only did Trump depend on big margins among older and non-college-educated whites, but about three-fifths of House Republicans also represent districts older than the national average. And about three-fourths hold seats where more whites than the national average lack a college degree.

As William Hoagland, a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center who formerly worked as a top Senate Republican budget aide, told The New York Times: “The politics of this make no sense to me whatsoever, in the sense that the population that brought them to the dance are the populists out there in the Midwest and South who rely on these programs that he’s talking about reducing.”

Hoagland’s point is underscored by the new analysis, which was provided by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning advocacy group respected in both parties for the rigor of its research. To track the beneficiaries of these programs, the center analyzed data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. To produce a more representative sample, it cumulated results from the survey over the three-year period from 2013 through 2015.

The center’s findings track earlier research by the nonpartisan Urban Institute that found that whites without a college degree represented most of those who gained coverage under the Affordable Care Act in the five Rustbelt states key to Trump’s victory, as well as in other core Republican states like Arkansas and Kentucky. Many of those voters would lose their coverage under the replacement health-care plan the House narrowly passed earlier this month.

The tilt toward blue-collar whites is, if anything, even more pronounced in the programs Trump’s budget targets than in the health-care law. Consider the SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps. The analysis examined households that have received income from the program over the previous year and separated them according to the education level of the household member with the most schooling.

White households whose most educated member held less than a four-year college degree represented the highest share of all households receiving SNAP benefits in Trump’s key states: 69 percent in Iowa, 57 percent in Ohio, 55 percent in Wisconsin, 52 percent in Michigan, and 50 percent in Pennsylvania. The numbers were comparable in heavily white and blue-collar states like West Virginia (85 percent), Maine (82 percent), Kentucky (74 percent), Montana (68 percent), Indiana (61 percent), Missouri (59 percent), Tennessee (56 percent), and Arkansas (55 percent).