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The New York Times is of course a left wing newspaper, but they do have journalistic integrity when it comes to facts:
Donald Trump’s Backers Express Deep and Diverse Support
By ASHLEY PARKER and MAGGIE HABERMANMARCH 1, 2016
Donald J. Trump won the vote of a 59-year-old cabdriver in the Boston suburbs who said he lost his trucking business after immigrants began delivering cargo for less.
In Loudoun County, Virginia, one of the country’s wealthiest, he won the backing of a newly separated mother and a longtime Democrat who spoke of the possibility of another terrorist attack, saying, “I don’t think we feel safe right now.”
And Mark Harris, a 48-year-old owner of an antiques shop in Canton, Ga., said he did not much care for Mr. Trump’s ego and worried that his impolitic speech could derail American diplomacy.
But Mr. Harris voted for Mr. Trump, too.
“He’s not afraid to get in the trenches and fight for you,” Mr. Harris said. “He’s going to be a bully, and he’s going to tell them what he thinks, and he’s going to push to get it done. He don’t care who he makes mad in the process.”
Mr. Trump’s string of victories Tuesday, the biggest day of primary voting, was not unexpected. But interviews with Trump voters from the middle-class suburbs of Minneapolis to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains revealed a surprising depth and diversity of support that could sustain him as a front-runner in the critical weeks to come.
They delivered him victories in conservative Southern strongholds like Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee, as well as Northern states like Massachusetts, where centrist Republicans hold sway. And though he lost to Senator Ted Cruz in Mr. Cruz’s home state, Texas, Mr. Trump prevailed in Virginia, fending off Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
Early exit polls confirmed his broad support; in Virginia, for example, he was winning not only among lower-income voters, his usual base, but also in other categories including veterans and self-described conservatives and white evangelicals. In Texas, those calling themselves political moderates, the kinds of voters some rivals are counting on, were favoring Mr. Trump as well.
In interviews, Mr. Trump’s supporters did not appear defined by a common ideology. But they had a unifying motivation — a deep-rooted, pervasive sense of anxiety about the state of the country, and an anger and frustration at those they felt were encroaching on their way of life.
Asked what they liked in Mr. Trump, his voters described attributes that his opponents have tried to paint as failings. His fierce and sometimes offensive comments on Mexican and Muslim immigrants, and on waterboarding and killing family members of Islamic State fighters, demonstrate, his voters said, a refreshing willingness to disregard political correctness.
“He’s saying how the people really feel,” said Janet Aguilar, 59, clad in a Red Sox jacket, who voted for Mr. Trump in Everett, Mass. “We’re all afraid to say it.”
Where others see a twice-divorced ladies’ man now married to a much younger model, his fans saw the head of a successful family whose children, as Albert Banda, the cabdriver from Somerville, Mass., put it, are “respectable and decent members of society” who “aren’t running around like Paris Hilton and dragging their bodies through the mud.”
Mr. Trump’s huge ego? Not necessarily a problem. “He doesn’t just want to be a president. He wants to be the greatest president,” said Elizabeth Burns, the Virginia mother, who said she campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2008. “That works in our favor because he doesn’t want to fail. He sees himself as too big to fail.”
Those supporting him did not always agree with everything he said, or the way he said it, and they were not even convinced that he would be able to follow through on all of his big, brash promises.
cont . . .
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Trump still the front runner (Read 207546 times)
