Secret Trump Voters

What I think I learned by paying attention to my College Reunion

Trump may well have more support than shows up in polls.   

I spent the past few days talking with people at a 45th Harvard college reunion.  They are ashamed to say they like Trump.

Yes, I know the sample is untypical of the nation.   But we are typical of ourselves:

  **We are all more or less age 67.

  **We were all pretty good at the stuff teachers reward in high school, which is why we got into Harvard back in 1967.

  **Nearly all of us ended up in a profession of some kind after getting some additional advanced degree, e.g. medicine, law, education, or finance.

The class in general assembly, amid a food worker strike

  **Nearly everyone is financially comfortable and I think an anthropologist/sociologist would term us upper middle class professionals.  

A survey of our class indicated that some 85% of us planned to vote for Hillary Clinton and 6% of us for Trump.  The rest were for Johnson, Stein, or would not vote.

So, this group is not representative of America, but we are representative of ourselves: prosperous, educated baby boomers.   I have two observations to share.   

Secret Trump:  One is that in a meeting of the whole class in attendance--a group of about 400--someone asked for a show of hands of people planning to vote for Trump.   It was a joke.  The entire room broke into laughter.  People got the joke.

The joke was that of course people voting for Trump would not want to admit it publicly.  The notion that people would admit liking Trump was laughable.

Gender Gap:   The second is that my some of my non-Jewishmale classmates who had business careers had typically voted for Republicans.   When I asked them how they felt about Trump they often would hem and haw and voice indecision about what to do about voting for Trump.  

They typically voted Republican.  This seemed very unsurprising to me and is very consistent with my experience in Medford, Oregon with my better off professional clients here.   Professional and business people who earn over $300,000 a year, and especially over a million dollars a year, consider themselves very highly taxed.  Republicans are anti-tax.  Trump would push for lower taxes for people like themselves than would Hillary.  

Moreover, they are not in unions; they struggle to suppress unions.  People in this cohort are familiar with the rules regarding sexual harassment and racial and religious discrimination.  The companies they own--or that they are general counsel to--live under these rules regarding collective bargaining and harassment.  They consider them a minefield of liability, and they resent the political forces that put them in place, i.e. Democrats.  The normal center of gravity for them would be to be Republican.  They considerTrump to be a plausible but very imperfect candidate.  Many said they were undecided.

This phenomenon is real

The female half of this Harvard-affiliated couple standing next to those men were adamantly for Hillary in overwhelming numbers. .  A common occurrence would be for the wife to hear her husband mumbling about Trump and she would start shaking her head in opposition and dismay.   Trump is terrible, they would interrupt, and they would say something about trying to talk reason into her husband.  The couples were in disagreement.   Never did it present itself as the woman voting for Hillary and the man for Trump.   It was the woman for Hillary and the man  saying he was "undecided."

The polls may be missing something.  I draw two inferences from these multiple anecdotal occurrences.   One is that the gender gap is real at the individual and household level.   And the second is that Trump may well have more support than shows up in polls.  A educated man who admits that he plans to vote for Trump is causing trouble at home and maybe admitting he's a racist or misogynist.

What reasonable educated professional man could vote for Trump?  Someone who votes his tax-interest and ignores Trump's comments on women and religion and ethnicity.  Better to mumble and say one is undecided.

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There is more.   Once a week I upload a podcast of a conversation and commentary created by me and Thad Guyer, an attorney who specializes in representing whistleblowing employees.  We talk about the current state of the race, the mainstream polls, the outlier poll, Trump's message, Hillary's weaknesses, Bill Clinton's past sins, former Sanders voters, the ghost of Nader, and more.   Check it out.

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