Myth of the Obama-Trump Voter Exploded

I've been saying it since November: There is no such thing as a person who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but voted for Trump in 2016.

No. Such. Thing.

Digby:

I know there are no more interesting or important people in the world than the vaunted Trump Voter, but I have long thought that the idea that there exists a substantial subset of Obama-Trump voters. My theory has always been that to the extent they existed, they were basically Republicans who may have voted for Obama because the world was going to hell in a hand-basket and they didn't like Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney for personal reasons.
Ed Kilgore catches up with the latest on this alleged phenomenon:

The defection of West Virginia Governor Jim Justice yesterday from the Democratic to the Republican Party will inevitably fuel tired rhetoric about Reagan Democrats, or white-working-class Americans, or “heartland voters,” leaving the Donkey Party in hordes in protest against its radical bicoastal liberalism. Democrats obviously need to pay attention to voters they’ve recently lost or failed to energize, all over the place, and in various demographic categories.
But the “Trump Democrat” phenomenon may have been a bit oversold. Justice obviously was never much of a Democrat to begin with. And the broader category of “Obama-Trump voters”—those who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012, and then for the mogul in 2016—may have been misunderstood as well. Or so reports the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank:
[N]ew data, and an analysis by AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer that he shared with me, puts all this into question. The number of Obama-to-Trump voters turns out to be smaller than thought. And those Obama voters who did switch to Trump were largely Republican voters to start with. The aberration wasn’t their votes for Trump but their votes for Obama. 

One problem with the much-discussed idea that Obama-Trump voters swung the election is that voters notoriously over-report votes for the election winner after the election. So some Obama-Trump voter didn’t actually vote for Obama, and others didn’t actually vote for Trump. (Some may have even voted for everyone other than Obama and Trump). That reduces the magnitude of the “flip.”
To the extent that Obama-Trump voters were identified as those who voted for the 44th president in either 2008 or 2012, it is important to remember that Obama won pretty big the first time around: according to exit polls, he won 9 percent of self-identified Republicans and 20 percent of self-identified conservatives. He also won independents—a category that includes a lot of people who usually vote Republican—52/44.
But there’s more than incidental evidence that apparent Obama-Trump voters aren’t loyal Democrats who suddenly flipped because Trump was appealing to their material or cultural interests: they supported Republicans down-ballot, too:
The AFL-CIO’s Podhorzer analyzed raw data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, out in the spring, and found that Obama-Trump voters voted for Republican congressional candidates by a 31-point margin, Republican Senate candidates by a 15-point margin and Republican gubernatorial candidates by a 27-point margin. Their views on immigration and Obamacare also put them solidly in the GOP camp. 

If these voters have been “lost” by the Democratic Party, many of them are probably lost for good.
Milbank concludes: “The party would do better to go after disaffected Democrats who didn’t vote in 2016 or who voted for third parties.” A vote’s a vote, and in a competitive environment it makes no sense for Democrats to write anyone off. But the obsession with “Obama-Trump voters” may be myopic.

There are good philosophical and ideological reasons for figuring out how to address the economic woes of this group of voters. Even if you don't care much for the way they think, they have kids who need a decent chance at a better life. But the idea that they are the electoral holy grail has always seemed to me to be a convenient way to prove some prior assumptions about the 2016 election.

In any case, it's worth wondering if Democrats should be so focused on this group of voters to the exclusion of some others who are at least equally important to mobilize for a 2018 victory. It's not a zero sum game, but it does require that these Trump voters not be elevated to the level of all-important "super-voters." Until the economy is completely falling apart as it was after the last GOP administration, they may not be gettable.

 All Democrats need to do is remove the barriers preventing their natural voters from voting: voter suppression, voter ID laws,  restrictive voting times and places, fiery hoops to jump through to register to vote and felon disenfranchisement.

Do that, dems, and every white voter in the country could go repug and Democrats would still win.

When everybody votes, Democrats win.