Obama-Trump voters are still Trump voters

Yet they are not monolithic

When people malign the existence of swing voters, I usually scream at them until they give up or block my phone number forever. Whatever. Such is life when you’re trying to convince people that unicorns actually exist.

Swing voters are indeed real. Let’s talk today about one variant of them: the Obama-Trump voter. Though swingy in 2016, they’re more Trump voter than Obama voter. Like someone who’s just gone through a bitter divorce, maybe we should drop the hyphen?

Consider the evidence.

A New York Times/Siena College poll from last November found that “All the leading Democratic candidates trail in the precincts or counties that voted for Barack Obama and then flipped to Mr. Trump.” Non-College whites were about as pro-Trump then as they were in 2016, according to their data:

Nate Cohn wrote:

In the last presidential election, millions of voters flipped from Barack Obama to Donald Trump or from Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton. In the Midwestern battlegrounds, the flood of white, working-c…