Trump Churches the Pundit Class and Cruz

Poor UK gamblers. 

They have to rely on the analytically inept mainstream American punditry for their forecasting and explications of American elections. Nitwits like Nate Silver and Nate Cohn of the New York Times, whose confirmation bias manipulation of data analytics (masking their subjective bias as objective analysis, exhibiting every form of analytical error one can make) forms a classic study of how not to analyze data. Or depending upon the billionaire-owned major media (New York Times, Wall Street Journal & Washington Post all owned by politically-oriented, Trump-hating fellow billionaires, so offended Trump has betrayed his class).

A few candidates and consultants mirror their errors. Both the press and the Cruz campaign still can't figure out that being "evangelical" doesn't mean you are a church-centric, ideological conservative, who spends your nights fretting over the next Supreme Court nominee, or still dreaming of the imaginary day abortion ends or gay marriage is undone. Saying your "evangelical" in the south is like saying you’re “Catholic" if you’re an Irishman from Boston — it’s a cultural statement for many, rather than a statement of religious devotion or church-centric orientation, much like the difference between those Catholics who go to mass every day and those who go for the holidays. Trump faces serious limitations with the church-centric Republican primary voter, especially the college-educated, middle-class, Sunday School is where you should meet your wife types. But newsflash to Cruz & the press: most evangelicals don't even go to church weekly, and many rarely go to church at all (even if they understate that in polls because, heck, you still tell your mama you go every Sunday). 

This is why Cruz can't understand how sixty-five-percent white evangelical voters could ignore his bonafides on the church-centric cultish issues of abortion, gay rights, the proper pronunciation of Second Corinthians, and their self-selective definition of a "true conservative." It's because most evangelicals, especially in dixieland, could care less about that. This isn't the 1992 GOP; this is the 2016 GOP, where working class populists who voted for Clinton in 1992 now flooded the GOP electorate, completing a GOP conversion commenced in 1996 and culminating in Trump's ascendance. The media -- with 'nare an evangelical amongst them, least of all blue-collar southern roots -- can't comprehend it either. 

Having grown up in the south, the biggest difference amongst Evangelical voters are the ones for whom church is a central institution as opposed to those for whom it is just a cultural statement. What is missed by many of the analysts is that about half of the evangelical vote are not church-centric voters; indeed, about half rarely or only occasionally go to church (much like Catholic voters). This biased thought process in the punditry and press is because the activists all come from the church-going crowd, but they don’t speak for half of the evangelical vote. The polls can further understate this phenomenon because a percentage of voters won’t admit in any poll they rarely go to church in a culture where you are “supposed to,” but deep analytics will reveal this data.

Precinct data reveals this. In the working class, lower-church going precincts in counties like Horry, Trump ran up huge advantages (of the kind Nevada previewed) with more than 2-1 margins and often exceeding 50% of the primary vote. In the middle-class, high-church attendance precincts, like Greenville's 27th and 28th precincts (home to Bob Jones University students and faculty), Trump barely managed 10% of the vote. In the upper-income climes of Charleston, where another dimwit from the New York Times "fivethirtyeight" site spent their time trying to "study" evangelical voters (and completely confused by no one saying they were voting for Trump because she was focusing on church-going, middle-class evangelicals, which compose only a 1/4 of the evangelical vote), Trump found similarly harsh and disparate losses. But just skip across to blue collar North Charleston, and Trump dominated like the populists of yesteryear, running up 50% margins in multiple precincts. 

Trump exceeds with working class voters due primarily to an economic appeal, not a religious one. For a majority of evangelicals, their concern is economy and security, not the pastor's concerns. If the media and courtier class of hangers-on remembered the south also proved hospitable to the likes of Huey Long and Big Jim Folsom, then they wouldn't, like Cruz, continue to have to learn this the hard way, while the media continues to buffoon their way through another electoral campaign. Leave it to a New York billionaire from Queens to get GOP voters better than the party's own consultants, activists and pundits. 

Trump stumps again.