If there is one thing that Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Donald Trump agree on, it is that 2016 was a watershed election for this country. Peasants with pitchforks stormed the ballot box demanding dramatic changes in a rigged system. The result was a president who constantly throws cultural red meat to his white nationalist base and believes he can win in 2020 without making any effort to appeal to the center. Warren and Sanders, for their part, think the system is more rigged than ever, and that the key to success in 2020 is the mobilization of the blue base for what they view as real change; they have also written off the center.
They’re all wrong. Trump won the GOP nomination because he was unopposed in his lane, and his principal rivals were not. Even running against her own historic unpopularity, the constant references to her e-mail pseudo-scandal, and the understandable desire for change after eight years of Obama, Hillary Clinton still won the popular vote, and would have won the election but for the efforts of Jill Stein. That doesn’t amount to an overwhelming public demand for a revolution, which was subsequently confirmed by the outcome of the midterms.
Trump can’t win in 2020 without the votes from people in the right-center who can’t stand him. Will the Democrats try to win those people over, or push them away by promising a PC paradise which identifies them as racial and capitalist oppressors? That is the real question that will be decided over the next 16 months.