Assume, for purposes of argument, that conditions in 2020 are pretty much the same as they are now: there is no war or recession, and Trump’s approval ratings are around 40 percent. How will the Democrats go after him?
The task, in a nutshell, is to either entice large numbers of new voters into the system, or peel off enough 2016 Trump voters to prevail. Conceptually, there are two ways to do this:
1. The Competence Coalition: The objective here is to win over the CDs and some disaffected PBPs–particularly suburban women–who held their noses and voted for Trump in 2016 because they simply couldn’t swallow Hillary. The candidate in this scenario would be a realo, and the program essentially would be to restore the Obama status quo, with the exception of the tax cut, whose more popular features would be retained. No new large spending programs would be proposed. The focus of the campaign would be on putting an end to Trump’s corrupt, divisive, incompetent, and faux populist administration. “Stop the madness” would be an appropriate slogan.
In other words, it is the 2016 Clinton campaign, minus Hillary, and with four years of experience with Trump.
2. Vive la Revolution! In this scenario, the Democrats nominate a fundi, who blows off the CDs and PBPs and attempts to win by flipping the Reactionaries on economic issues and by bringing new voters into the system. The Democratic platform proposes to roll back the entire Trump tax cut and to use the money for new spending programs, including single-payer. The premise is that a full-throated left-wing platform is necessary to motivate the opposition. Trump is attacked primarily as a faux populist who sold out to Wall Street.
This is the Sanders scenario. How it ends will be discussed in my next post.