Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of Left podcast. It's said that we live in a

melting pot here in the US. Perhaps it's more of a salad bar, who knows? In any case, there are a lot of people coming from a lot of different backgrounds, cultures, histories and geographies all about to vote in a few weeks.

Today, we try to understand at least roughly how people's backgrounds

influence their vote. Sources providing our top takes in about 50 minutes today

include the NPR Politics Podcast, What a Day, the Wall Street Journal State of

the Stat, A.J. Plus, Brown University, and Vox. Then in the additional deeper dies

half the show there will be more on three cohorts or give or take

section A is a bit of a mixed bag actually including discussions on LGBTQ Muslim, and Asian American and Pacific Islander voters.

Section B is on Latino and black voters and Section C is white and rural voters.

Let's start with a group we hear a lot about.

White voters without college degrees.

Dominico, they're a key group

because they're just a really big group in this country, right?

How have their numbers changed?

Yeah, they are a big group in the country.

In fact, in all of the seven swing states that were paying attention to, the three blue

wall states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the four Sunbelt states, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.

They are the largest single group, but they're on the decline everywhere, which makes the

job for Trump and his campaign to turn out these voters a lot more difficult.

They're a key group for Trump and they're a shrinking share of the electorate essentially, right?

Yeah, they are and when you look at all the seven states they've gone down a couple points just since 2020.

And if you zoom out and go back to 2008, you know, take Wisconsin for example, was

...