This article was originally published at FiveThirtyEight on September 29, 2016 Here’s a scary stat for Democrats: In 2012, President Obama won re-election by almost 5 million votes, but about 47 million eligible white voters without a college degree — including 24 million men — didn’t bother to vote. In 2016, these nonvoters are part of the demographic that is most strongly in favor of Donald Trump.
If Trump rouses even a fraction of these notoriously disaffected Americans — like this grease-smudged, 61-year-old first-time voter in western Pennsylvania — he could surge to victory. There’s just one catch: If we’re on the cusp of a blue-collar Great Awakening, it’s not yet showing up in the registration data. Tuesday was National Voter Registration Day, as good a time as any to pick apart the potential 2016 electorate. The Census estimates that in 2012 there were 215 million voting-age citizens, of whom 153 million were registered to vote (roughly 129 million votes were ultimately cast that year). Just under 153 million of the eligible citizens were non-Hispanic whites, of whom 112
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