If there is one thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on, it is that the 2016 election was a mandate for radical change. And so, the Republicans have offered overt white nationalism and protectionism in addition to their usual mix of regressive tax cuts and regulation in order to appease their base, while the Democratic candidates for president in 2020 will apparently be proposing massive new spending programs and tax increases in an effort to win the white workers back.
The reality of 2016 is far more prosaic:
- Trump won the GOP nomination because he was unopposed in the white nationalist lane;
- Trump actually received fewer votes than Mitt Romney in the general election, and lost the popular vote to Clinton;
- Trump’s reactionary base didn’t succeed in electing McCain or Romney, and they weren’t responsible for his victory, either; and
- Clinton lost in the Electoral College because swing voters in a handful of states were tired of Democrats after eight years of Obama, and because she was uniquely unpopular, largely due to the e-mail issue.
The key to a Democratic victory in 2020 is not, therefore, to satisfy some huge pent-up demand for expensive new federal programs, but to win back the swing voters who held their noses and voted for Trump in the forlorn hope that he was the brilliant businessman he played on TV. The best way to lose the election is to force those voters to choose between a corrupt, inept narcissist and a wannabe socialist. Based on what I’ve seen of the programs of the Democratic candidates, that is a very real possibility.