Politics
WATCH: CNN Data Expert Reveals Massive Shift, Stuns Host: ‘Trump Has Changed The Electorate’
The American electorate has shifted vastly in the wake of President Donald Trump’s second victory, a stunned prognosticator on CNN announced Wednesday.
Harry Enten, the network’s go-to source for interpreting polling data, declared, “The Republican Party has changed the electorate” following Trump’s win, a seismic shift that has seen working-class and minority voters break for him in greater numbers than any Republican presidential nominee in the modern era.
Party identification across the country, a category where Democrats have traditionally held an edge, has now slipped from their grasp. Since February of 2021, one month after former President Joe Biden took office, the electorate has moved from +6 Democratic registration to +2 for Republicans, an unprecedented 8-point swing, according to Enten.
“There are more Republicans in the electorate than there are Democrats,” he said. “Donald Trump and the Republicans have remade the electorate.”
“They’ve turned some people over from being Democrats or independents to become Republicans. New folks have entered the electorate who are more Republican-leaning, and so when you combine that with the fact that Republicans are really, really behind Donald Trump, all of a sudden, you get a winning recipe whereby you break the normal rules of politics and give Donald Trump that positive net approval rating when he had pretty much a consistently negative one in term number one.”
WATCH:
Enten, 36, may very well be CNN’s best hope at regaining President Trump’s trust. He reliably delivers positive news about the president and the GOP’s standing with voters today, even as other pollsters seek to dent their ascent.
Last month, Enten revealed that voters have undergone a 33-point swing in favor of President Trump’s immigration policy of mass deportations, a shift he said is propelling overall positive approval ratings for Trump.
“It just gives the Republicans a lot more leverage” to accomplish their objectives, Enten observed. “Simply put, immigration is an issue that Donald Trump and the Republicans are going to go to the well over and over and over again because Americans are much more on their side than they are on the Democrats’ side.”
Exit polling by NBC News found that one in three minority voters cast their ballot for President Trump, a remarkable feat for a party that is regularly castigated in the media as a vanguard of Christian and Western world values. Earlier this month, a Republican-leaning poll found that a jaw-dropping 42% of black men approve of Trump’s job performance.
The president’s dominance has left him comfortable throwing his weight around Washington, D.C., where he has mocked the party’s old leadership wing. During a press conference last week, Trump was asked what he thought about former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) voting against Tulsi Gabbard to serve as director of national intelligence.
“If I didn’t come along, the Republican Party wouldn’t even exist right now,” Trump said. “Mitch McConnell never really had it. He had an ability to raise money because of his position as leader, which anybody could do. You could do it, even. And that’s saying a lot,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.