White flight imperils GOP

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Do Trump-Clinton numbers matter months before Election Day?

Electoral models and polls out to predict a winner

[The final edition of Fox News First is coming next week. Are you prepared for what’s next? Stay tuned for the details.]

Buzz Cut:
· White flight imperils GOP
· Power Play: Hillary’s golden gamble
· French kiss-off for GOP?
· Lawyer for Clinton aide blocks email questions
· How considerate!

WHITE FLIGHT IMPERILS GOP
A new poll from Quinnipiac University shows the racial and gender divides long a part of American politics are certainly still with us in the Trump-Clinton election.

In a curious way, though, this already-ugly contest is actually decreasing some of the traditional racial separation in politics.

No, really!

The overall result of the poll – Hillary Clinton 4 points ahead of Donald Trump – is in line with most recent polling that shows a relatively close race at the start.

But this poll gives us a whole new universe of demographic data to explore.

One thing that should come as no surprise in the first him-or-her general election is that the already-present gender gaps have intensified. Trump leads with men by 16 points, almost twice the margin Mitt Romney enjoyed in 2012. Hillary Clinton takes women by a whopping 24 points, again almost double President Obama’s Election Day advantage four years ago.

But despite a great deal of hot rhetoric about race and ethnicity this cycle, the Republican/Democratic divides among non-white voters are not much changed from four years ago – perhaps revealing how deeply divided the nation already was on those lines.

Clinton leads Trump among Hispanics by 47 points in the new poll, a 3-point bump from Obama’s 2012 exit poll showing. She leads among African-American voters by 89 points, just 3 points more than Obama.

Trump’s advantage with white voters, according to Quinnipiac, is 17 points – 3 points less than Romney’s final showing in 2012. That could spell serious trouble for the GOP.

Though white peoples’ electoral clout continues to decline, about 70 percent of voters this fall are expected to be white. Unless Trump can find a way to radically alter his standing with non-white voters he would need to considerably outperform Romney in this most-important demographic.

A smaller share of a smaller population isn’t going to feed the bulldog.

So where can Trump go to increase his standing with whites? As the WaPo explained, Trump’s white deficit tends to fall along the lines of educational attainment and income.

The Q poll definitely bears that out. When it comes to whites without college degrees, the Trump trounces Clinton by 27 points, almost identical to Romney’s margin with that group.

But when it comes to whites with college degrees, the GOP is taking on water with Trump at the helm. Among white college-degree holding voters in the Q poll, Trump leads by a slim 8 points. Romney smoked Obama by 24 points among white voters with only college degrees.

(Obama did win with whites holding post-graduate degrees, a filter Quinnipiac did not apply.)

The outsized gender gaps and persistent racial divides of this election are certainly survivable for Trump if he is matching Clinton measure for measure. Put simply, Trump has a problem with women, and Clinton has nearly as big a problem with men.

But the danger for Trump is if whites don’t unite behind him the way they have for Republicans in the past. So far, that seems to be what’s happening and the holdouts seem mostly to be among the college educated.

The WaPo/ABC News poll, for example, shows Trump down 23 points with white, college-educated women. That needs to be much, much closer to a tie.

What today’s Q poll tell us is that white voters are less Republican this cycle but non-white voters are more united on the Democratic side. It’s not the way that Republicans imagined breaking the demographic silos of American politics, but it surely is happening.

The issue for Trump is that there are still too many white people in America for him to be able to underperform his predecessors with this group and still win.

POWER PLAY: HILLARY’S GOLDEN GAMBLE
The delegate math says she will be the nominee, so why has Hillary Clinton decided to go all out in the Golden State primary? Chris Stirewalt describes the prospects and perils for Clinton’s California push, in just 60 seconds. WATCH HERE.

WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…
Vanity Fair: “Along with the ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz and Orson Welles’s ‘Rosebud’ sled…there is probably no more iconic item of Hollywood memorabilia than the Maltese Falcon, the black statuette that Humphrey Bogart, as detective Sam Spade, tracked down in John Huston’s classic film of the same name. Lost to history for decades, it resurfaced in the 1980s…. But at the auction in Bonhams’s Madison Avenue showroom on November 25, 2013, the bidding quickly passed $1 million…Only when the bidding reached $3.5 million did the bidder in the crowd surrender, sending the Falcon to the man on the phone, who was later revealed to represent Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas hotel and casino billionaire…That is the official version of what happened to the Maltese Falcon. But it is just one chapter in a complex tale. It turns out there is another, far stranger version, and another Falcon, several more in fact.”

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POLL CHECK
Real Clear Politics Averages
General Election: Clinton vs. Trump: Clinton +1.5 point
Generic congressional vote: Democrats +2.2

FRENCH KISS-OFF FOR GOP?
Fox News: “Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol is looking to recruit National Review staff writer and Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran David French for an independent presidential run, sources confirmed Tuesday to Fox News. French is a constitutional lawyer, a recipient of the Bronze Star, and an author of several books who lives in Columbia, Tenn…Sources told Fox News on Tuesday that, ‘he’s (French) talking with lots of people (donors, strategists, etc.), but in the mode of planning for it not just considering it.’ Kristol kicked off the speculation, and the backlash, when he claimed Sunday: ‘There will be an independent candidate -- an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.’”

[Ed. note: If conservative dissidents have more in mind than just a Twitter hashtag, they’d better match their dreamboat candidate with a dreamboat full of million-dollar checks. And right away. No ballot access and no name id means no chance, even as a spoiler.]

TESTIMONY DETAILS TRUMP UNIVERSITY FRAUD

NYT: “In blunt testimony revealed on Tuesday, former managers of Trump University, the for-profit school started by Donald J. Trump, portray it as an unscrupulous business that relied on high-pressure sales tactics, employed unqualified instructors, made deceptive claims and exploited vulnerable students willing to pay tens of thousands for Mr. Trump’s insights. One sales manager for Trump University, Ronald Schnackenberg, recounted how he was reprimanded for not pushing a financially struggling couple hard enough to sign up for a $35,000 real estate class, despite his conclusion that it would endanger their economic future. He watched with disgust, he said, as a fellow Trump University salesman persuaded the couple to purchase the class anyway.  ‘I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme,’ Mr. Schnackenberg wrote in his testimony, ‘and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.’”

LAWYER FOR CLINTON AIDE BLOCKS EMAIL QUESTIONS
Fox News: “Lawyers for senior Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills, during a nearly five-hour deposition last week in Washington, repeatedly objected to questions about IT specialist Bryan Pagliano’s role in setting up the former secretary of state’s private server. According to a transcript of the deposition with watchdog group Judicial Watch released on Tuesday, Mills attorney Beth Wilkinson – as well as Obama administration lawyers – objected to the line of questioning about Pagliano, who has emerged as a central figure in the FBI’s ongoing criminal probe of Clinton’s email practices.  ‘I’m going to instruct her not to answer. It’s a legal question,’ Wilkinson responded, when asked by Judicial Watch whether Pagliano was an ‘agent of the Clintons’ when the server was set up.”

RACE NOTES
David Drucker describes the GOP’s fear that Trump will demand loyalty without returning it – WashEx

Trump issued veteran checks after media report - AP

Trump spox says that ethnicity of judge in Trump University case is “relevant” - Fox News Latino

Georgia Sen. David Perdue sees Trump in himself - WaPo

Republican Latinos can’t bring themselves to vote for Trump - Boston Globe

Businessman pledges $1 million for Libertarian effort - The Hill

WITHIN EARSHOT
“The kind of nauseating verbal abuse that once was contained to comments sections on blogs has now spread to Facebook and Twitter; announce the birth of your son and you’ll be sent messages about how your whole family should be sent to the gas chambers.” – Jim Geraghty writing about the spread of divisive rhetoric in the 2016 presidential race in NRO

HOW CONSIDERATE!
Global News: “A number of Chinese parking lots connecting Zhejiang province to Jiangxi province in China’s southeast have sparked outrage after introducing “female only” parking spaces that happen to be much larger than those not assigned to a particular gender. The spaces, designated by pink paint lines and the international symbol for woman, are 50 percent wider than other spaces in the service centres. The reason – because women are allegedly bad at parking. According to China’s Qianjiang Evening News, Pan Zhuren, director of the service area, said he decided to include the girls-only spaces after noticing that some female drivers were having trouble reversing into parking spots, or ‘parking carelessly.’”

AND NOW, A WORD FROM CHARLES…
“Whatever name it is, I think it’s a mistake for conservatives to run another candidate with the explicit intent essentially of blocking Trump from winning…he’s either going to win or not. And if he doesn’t win, he should not be able to claim he was stabbed in the back. That would be a terrible mistake in the future.” – Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier.”

Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Sally Persons contributed to this report. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.