White male voters comprised a substantial foundation of Trump's victory in the previous campaign. Much of his decisions aimed to appeal to the group through policies like sealing trade deals with China and Mexico, implementing strict immigration measures, and gaining progress on the border wall. As the months are looming over Election Day, recent surveys this month were published showing a decline in support in the voting population, namely seniors, white high school graduate voters, and evangelicals.


Decline in pollsa

According to previous data from 2016, Trump gained 71% of the white male vote. This year, Quinnipiac University released the results from their survey last week claiming that 64% of high school graduate level white males planned to vote for Trump. On a different survey by the same group, they found that from a sample of the population of the seniors in Florida, one of the key states in the 2016 campaign, 52% of the seniors would support presumptive Democratic candidate Biden while 42% said they would vote for Trump.

In a survey done by NBC News and Wall Street Journal in April, they discovered a similar trend among white voters with college degrees. They found that from the male respondents the support dropped from 53% to 44%, and among female respondents the original 44% dropped to 29%. At the same period, The Public Religion Research Institute reported a decline in approval of Trump's administration among white evangelicals by 11 points.

Communications director of the Trump campaign Tim Murtaugh dismissed the surveys. He said the data gathered by the members of the team was enough to convince him that the president was in "solid shape" in all of the states. He said that American voters trusted the president to rebuild the economy back up even if he had to do it from scratch, and that evangelicals have never seen a better pro-life president in the history of the United States. Murtaugh added that the campaign's polls in 17 states showed that Trump was closing in on Biden at 48% from the original deficit weeks ago.

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Won and lost in the margins

Democratic poll analyst Peter Hart asserted that the significance of the results of the surveys was not in the decline of voter approval in the past few weeks during the pandemic. He said Trump would primarily be spending time and effort regaining that support with his target audience. Hart added that it would drive the president harder in working on the base of his campaign and rekindling the support with rallies. Trump's campaign advisers expressed concern over some key states. Arizona especially was a solid Republican state that supported him from the 2016 elections.

Originally seen as a secure win for this year's presidential plebiscite, Trump was nothing short of hurt from the low approval among voters. Ever since four Democrats won statewide office in 2018, he started losing the favor of the people. Senator Martha McSally, a Republican, said that this was going to be a "race" that would be "won and lost in the margins", pertaining to the near-proportionate votes.