Donald Trump continued to defy expectations with a decisive win in Nevada on Tuesday night, and many in the political and media establishment have now conceded that he is winning over a variety of demographic groups.
"The billionaire real estate mogul, whose gold-plated hotel towers over the northern end of the famed glitzy strip here, easily won Nevada's Republican presidential caucuses, powered by an angry electorate tired of conventional politicians,"
wrote US News.
"This is Trump's third consecutive victory in the 2016 GOP nominating contest and another dagger in the nervous party establishment that had hoped Trump's popularity would fizzle at the ballot box."
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"We weren't expected to win too much and now we're winning, winning, winning the country," Trump said during his victory speech,
CNN reported. "We won the evangelicals. We won with young. With won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated."
Gathered below are seven voter groups who have cast their ballots for Trump, defying the conventional wisdom that they would never do so.
1. Hispanics — "Trump wasn't supposed to win Hispanics, but he appears to have won them,"
The Washington Post declared early Wednesday morning. Last summer, Trump said of Mexican immigrants: "They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." The mainstream media had a meltdown. Not even a year later, 45 percent of Latinos in Nevada backed
Trump, according to entrance polls reported by CNN.
2. Evangelicals — "Trump's support among evangelical voters has floored pundits. As a New Yorker whose name is plastered across buildings in the city, Trump is synonymous with the capital of the secular society that evangelicals detest,"
wrote Talking Points Memo. "And yet, Trump is resonating with the evangelical community." Trump won 34 percent of evangelicals in South Carolina and roughly 40 percent in Nevada.
3. Women — Ever since Fox News host Megyn Kelly questioned Trump's past statements about some women during the first Republican debate, pundits have predicted that the boisterous billionaire couldn't win over the female vote. Trump has won more women voters than his opponents, however, in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, according to exit polls
cited by The New York Times.
4. Conservatives — Trump's opponents love to bring up the billionaire's past stances on abortion, the economic stimulus, and more, but those attacks haven't stopped him yet.
As NBC News reported of the Nevada contest, Trump won "voters who are politically very conservative (38 percent), somewhat conservative (50 percent), and moderate (55 percent)."
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5. College graduates — In Nevada, Trump nearly won a majority of the vote among the more educated, 46 percent,
The New York Times reported. While he did not win the biggest share of college-educated voters in South Carolina or Iowa, he did win them in New Hampshire.
6. Westerners — Candidates from the Eastern seaboard can often win in the dense cities and suburbs of the Northeast, Midwest, and South, but often struggle in the Wild West. With one of his biggest margins of victory yet in Nevada, Trump, an accented billionaire from New York City, proved that he can win in the West.
7. Caucus-goers — After losing the Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz, many said Trump couldn't win in states that held caucuses instead of primaries, because caucus-goers usually tend to toe the party line.
USA Today reported, however, that in addition to "sweeping nearly every demographic group," the Nevada contest "also showed he could prevail in a caucus state."
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