In 1980, exit polling shows that 88 percent of voters in the presidential election were white. That was the year that Ronald Reagan turned the heads of working class white voters, carving out a chunk of the electorate dubbed "Reagan Democrats." Those voters never came back to the Democrats. In 2010, whites with no college education were nearly 10 points less likely to identify as Democrats than in the election that brought Reagan to the White House.

White voters, college graduate or not, have voted more Republican in the past three elections than they did in the Reagan era -- with the difference more stark among those without college educations.

As the white vote has declined, in other words, it's gotten more Republican. And those two things are why Donald Trump is in trouble. Even if he did as well as Mitt Romney did with white and nonwhite voters in 2012, Trump would get a smaller share of the electorate just because the group that Romney did best with (whites) will almost certainly be a smaller percentage of the electorate in 2016. Pew Research estimates that only 69 percent of voters this November will be white, down from 71. (Exit polls had the white portion of the electorate at 72 percent four years ago.)

AD

AD

But as it stands Trump is doing worse with both white and black voters, putting him deeper in the hole.

We can visualize that. We pulled exit poll data from 1980, 2000, 2008 and 2012 and combined it with data from the most recent Post-ABC poll and the turnout estimate from Pew to let you calculate how this election would play out if the electorate or voter choices this year matched years past.

Try, for example, the 1980 electorate with the 2016 polling. Or try 2016 polling with the 2012 electorate. (Notice that the 2016 polling and electorate shows Hillary Clinton up 10 while the poll itself shows her up only 8; that's a function of the more diverse electorate estimated by Pew.) You can also dive a bit deeper to see changes, looking at data by race, gender and education level. The calculations here are rough, multiplying the percentages together, so that latter group of data will often add up to less than 100 percent.