This Is the Single Most Depressing Finding in Today’s Polls Showing Trump Ahead

As the Democratic convention opens in Philadelphia, it’s yet another poll-panic morning as a new CNN poll shows Donald Trump gaining a large bounce from his own convention and going into the lead among registered voters nationally.  We shouldn’t take the head-to-head polling between conventions all that seriously, as a number of observers (including your humble blogger) have pointed out.

But I wanted to highlight this finding, because it tells us something important about the state of the country, irrespective of the ups and downs of the race:

Regardless of how you plan to vote, do you think Trump’s speech reflected the way you, personally, feel about things in the United States today or not:

Reflected your feelings: 45

Did not reflect your feelings: 48

So nearly half of respondents share Trump’s vision of an America in which crime is skyrocketing, dark hordes are spilling over the border, terrorists lurk around every corner, the threat is mounting from a refugee crisis that menaces “the west,” and most important, we’re hamstrung from dealing forcefully with all of these internal and external threats by “political correctness,” i.e, too much racial sensitivity. {snip}

But the demographic breakdowns are even more interesting. Whites say his speech reflected their feelings about the country by 52-41. Non-college whites say this by an overwhelming 60-34. White evangelicals say this by 73-22. But white college graduates say Trump did not reflect their feelings about the country by 53-39. This shows once again that Trumpism is causing a real cultural split among white voters along educational lines, suggesting that college educated whites are much more accepting of the cultural, social and demographic changes sweeping the country than blue collar whites are.

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