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The next question is if the #NeverTrump people know it, what are they going to do about it over the next 20 months? Most live in deep Blue areas so how they vote is immaterial (though #NeverTrump people living in Virginia could have a decision to make, if the state’s Democratic Party keeps chugging along with the current folks in charge and with a hard-core progressive as the preidential nominee.. The combination could put Virginia back in play in 2020).
George Will’s weekend column was on the insanity of the Democrats’ current economic positions. But this was the same George Will who nine moths ago urged conservatives to put Democrats in charge of Congress in 2018 because Trump needed to be restrained. He got 50 percent compliance, which has in turn helped move the Overton Window to the left, because of what is now considered acceptable in the House of Representatives, where Nancy Pelosi is now part of the ‘moderate’ wing. Be careful of what you wish for, though Will has yet to man-up and apologize for his June column, as William Safire did in his New York Times column after voting for Bill Clinton in 1992.
So if Will, Brett Stephens, Bill Kristol, et al, see the Democrats’ lurch to the far left as helping Trump in 2020, do they at the very least stay on the sidelines and quit with the incessant Trump-bashing, even when he’s doing things they supposedly supported four years ago? Or do they see the Democrats’ lurch left as being a bad thing because it will help get Trump re-elected, and spend the next 20 months trying to make the case to the public that the Dems aren’t really as bad/crazy as they look, and re-electing Trump would be a far worse fate for America? I don’t think Stephens will go that far, but some of the others (hello, Jennifer Rubin) I have no doubt will be all-in on that strategy.
Trumps winning is unlikely but possible. Trump only won because the Democrats were over confident and dismissed a few paths to victory by writing off certain blue collar areas. Those mistakes will not be allowed to happen again. Those votes will not be allowed to be counted for Trump next time.
I hope he is right, but it is 20 months to the election. That’s a whole lot of time for circumstances to change in favor or against the president and Republicans more generally. But, as has often been repeated in recent months, when your enemies are making mistakes, don’t interrupt them.
I think that Bert Stephens is right, if the Dems go full socialist in 2020, Severe Trump Skeptics like me will have no choice but to buy a clothes pin, and vote for Trump.
I’m guessing the comments to Stephens’ column are comedy gold.
It is so valuable to have Bret at the NYT to give liberals a reality check.
I wrote about this shortly after the election. As much as Trump irritates a good many people, he managed to convince people who usually vote democrat or who usually stay home to vote for him. The left isn’t trying to convince anyone who a leftist. Trump convinced people in a way that appealed to emotion and as a fan of stoicism, that appeal bothered me but his appeal worked.
I don’t think we will ever know if another Republican would have won.
In 2016 in the state of Wisconsin, Trump received 1,405,284 votes.
In 2012 in the state of Wisconsin, Romney received, 1.407.966 votes.
Marco Rubio received more votes in his Florida Senate race than Trump did in Florida.
John McCain received more votes in his Arizona Senate race than Trump did in Arizona.
In my opinion, the reason why Trump won in 2016 while Romney lost in 2012 has less to do with the attractiveness of Trump and Romney and more to do with that relative attractiveness of Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Obama received about 94 perent of the African-American vote.
Clinton received about 88 percent of the African-American vote, similar to the percentage that John Kerry received in 2004, the last time Obama was not on the ballot.
In 2020, the Democrat nominee will not likely have their case reopened by the FBI 8 days prior to the election by Jim Comey. Nor will the Democrat nominee be faulted for riots in Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, Maryland, Dallas, Texas and Charlotte, North Carolina.
It’s very likely that Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker or Bobby Jindal would have beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. But we will never know for sure.
Nope. The disdain of progressives for the working class has only intensified since 2016.
And the beauty of the upcoming campaign for Trump is that there are so many Dems in the field trying to break through that Trump will be mining free (to him) opposition research. If Schulz runs independent, Trump wins. If Schulz doesn’t run and Bernie is the candidate, Trump wins (because “crazy”). If Schulz doesn’t run and Biden is the candidate, Trump wins (because Biden (a) is low on intersectionality, (b) is lower on the socialism scale, and (c) is higher on the creepy of the #MeToo scale, so Dems will self-suppress on GOTV). If Schulz doesn’t run and any other of the uber-lefties is the candidate, Trump wins.
I actually think that the Democrat primary contest is a Biden versus Sanders contest. Of course, this assumes that Biden does throw his hat into the ring. But I think he will, probably in April or May.
If Sanders wins the nomination, I think Trump wins.
If Biden wins the nomination, I think Biden wins because if Biden wins it won’t be due to his presenting himself as more socialist than Sanders. That can’t be done.
Biden, if he wins the Democrat primary, will win because the Democrats choose someone Left of Center but still someone who enjoyed his honeymoon in someplace other than the Soviet Union.
Biden will appear to be the adult in the room and many moderate voters will view Biden as low-risk and Trump as high-risk.
But it’s early. So, I reserve my right to change my prediction at least 20 times between now and the 2020 election.
Okay, it appears that your bottom line is Trump wins.
What Dem would be hardest for Trump to beat?
As @heavywater says: Joe Biden. And I agree that Trump needs to do two things: (1) persuade the Obama voters than voted for him in 2016 to stay with him, and (2) sell the “creep” factor that attaches to Biden and his lack of intersectionality to demotivate the Dem base. I think that assuming the economy remains strong the 1st task should not be too difficult and, as stated before, there will be a lot to mine from the primary opponents to aid in selling this case. My guess is that if Biden is the nominee there will be lot of disaffected Dems who will stay home.
The WaPo story last week dredging up Sen. Biden’s mid-1970s opposition to busing for racial integration will not hurt him among the Obama/Trump voters he’s seeking to woo back to the Democrats, since that was the 1970s version of the elites not giving a damn about their lessers in sending kids all over the place while their own children went to private schools. But it could be a killer among the Democrats’ core group of woke primary voters, who would be outraged atUncle Joe being on the wrong side of intersectionality 40-plus years ago.
I wonder if Biden’s “put you back in chains” comment will be considered a lie by today’s fact checkers?
Just as the Democrats are split, so the Democratic-leaning media’s going to be split during the primary season (as they were in 2008 between Hillary and Obama, and to a lesser extent in ’16 with Hillary and Bernie). The more moderate-liberal media types will still try to cover for lovable Uncle Joe if they think Biden has the best chance to beat Trump. The hard-core left types who think the day of Socialism in America is at hand will savage him precisely because they think he’s not hardcore enough and any of their more progressive candidates can beat Trump.
Ya think?
I see nothing of these “more moderate liberal media types”. Just hard Leftist and harder Leftist. Angry they have driven their base with them. My Left friends I once had disagreements with are now collecting guns to shoot me / Conservatives with.
Moderate admittedly is a relative term, where in 2019 Nancy Peolsi is seem as a ‘moderate’ compared to AOC, Omar or Bernie. But the main split is between the Clinton type crony capitalists, who are fine with the system as long as they can get $$$ from big companies seeking political favors, and the True Believers on the far left, who think that they should, if not totally control the Means of Production, at least be able to walk in at any time and tell the people running those companies what their next Five Year Plan is going to be.
The media folks who think like the AOC crowd won’t hold back on targeting Biden, because they think anyone to the left of him can win the White House in 2020 due to the Dems’ inevitable demographic destiny. (That was also linked to Bernie’s 2016 run — the far left thought no need to play the gender card with Hillary; any Democrat was a lock to win the election).
A fine question. I notice that they are leaving AOC alone.
Things are better for black and gays and gay black than they have ever been in America. If you are a gay black dude (or lady or a xer) in America you can get a job if you show up on time and you have access to social welfare programs and the vast majority of charities will help you. More white-Americans are more accepting of black-Americans according to Pew research and more Americans of every color are more accepting of homosexuals. Why the insane hate? I know how unpleasant Trump can be but he is a Republican who never shuts up about how low black unemployment is and he is cool with gay folks.
Why is it that leftists are freaking out now that things are better than ever for groups that have been historically marginalized. Things are better. Why can’t anyone accept that things are better?
If Biden is the choice, nothing he said before that could hurt his chances will be surfaced by the MSM. He’ll be sold as the return to normalcy, the restoration of the good-feelings era of the Obama years, when everything was good. He’s the means by which the AOC wing craziness is swept under the rug. Or the plugs, if you wish.
You can’t do ‘important’ things and be historical if you live in calm, mundane times. If there’s not a Hitler out there, a Hitler must be designated, so that the people wanting to fundamentally change the U.S. can convince themselves they’re battling against pure evil in historic times. Combine they with younger people who have little knowledge of what really bad times are, and you end up with a group pretending nothing’s changed since the early 1960s on Americans’ feelings about race or gender (to the point where in things like reparations or the Masterpiece Cake Shop lawsuit, the end goal isn’t for peaceful relations, but to make people in the 21st Century pay for wrongs done in the 19th and 20th Centuries, if they don’t completely go along with The Narrative).
One reason why there might be reason to be a little pessimistic regarding Trump’s chances in 2020 is that Trump only won Michigan by 10,704 votes, Wisconsin by 22,748 votes and Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes.
That’s a total of 77,744 votes in just 3 states with enough electoral votes to tip the electoral college.
Consider that each year Trump has been president, over 500,000 immigrants have been naturalized, become American citizens, and are now eligible to vote. So, that’s about 2 million for a four year term.
It starts to look like the demographics of the electorate will have changed enough by 2020 to tilt the playing field towards the Democrat nominee, unless many of these immigrants are from Venezuela.
I did not expect that Trump (or any GOP) would have won the Presidency in the last election. I did not think the government / Democrats would allow it to happen. Well they screwed up and left a slight path that Trump was able to run and win on. I doubt they will make that same mistake twice so the chances that Trump (or any GOP) will win this time is almost impossible. Still it is a big country, there are a lot of moving parts, the Democrats are world class screw ups, and they have to work within a veneer of “legality” so it will not be impossible. Just very, very, very , very unlikely to happen.
I think its a bit premature to argue that recently minted immigrants will necessarily go in the Democrat’s favor, it also depends upon where those immigrants are settled (if they were all in New York and California that wouldn’t change much).
Where demographics are definitely not in Trump’s favor is that half of Trump’s coalition were senior citizens in 2016 and the Democrats have strong margins in younger generations. I would gander that age alone would have killed that margin of voters that gave Trump the edge in those states. Add on top the issue of coalition friction, where voters are lost over time by default, and Trump is at a disadvantage.
Stephens is making the mistake that several here, who are quite devoted to Trump’s success, are in that they are imposing their values onto how the world is. That is a natural response but it is flawed.
If it was true that such was too far left then those politicians shouldn’t be in office. Yet they are in office, some of them–like Bernie–are in office in a rural state. Those politicians are not outside the mainstream. They may appear that way because of polarization but we are also fairly isolated from their constituents.
The Democratic Primary has the potential to be a clown show. Hopefully it will be but there is a chance that it could narrow rather quickly and the Democratic Party loves to limit the number of debates. But even if it is a clown show that does not disqualify the winner of it, as Trump can testify to, from becoming President.
A strong economy and successful foreign policy does not guarantee victory. Bush I can testify to that and unlike Bush Trump does not seem to keen on expanding his base and has a penchant for making inflammatory comments that energize his opposition, 2018 being a recent example.
Prove Trump will win in 2020? Of course not. And that Bret Stephens says it, in my opinion, makes it less likely.
There has been a spate of articles like this:
Why Trump will Win from American Spectator.
Has Trump found the Formula for 2020 from Pat Buchanan.
Why Trump is Destined for an Historic Win in 2020 by Conrad Black.
Sound and Fury.
At the moment, I think Biden poses the biggest threat. What’s his stance on The Green Leap Forward? If he distances himself from the radicals he’s going to appeal to a much broader base. I’m probably being optimistic, but I think the overt Socialism and destruction of American industry scares moderate Democrats.
Nice piece. I was a Never Trumper who voted for Gary Johnson. I still find a lot of things about Trump appalling. On the other hand, in a lot of ways he’s exceeded my expectations and I no longer think him as risky a choice as I did two years ago. Add that to the absolutely gobsmacking leftward lurch among the democrats and I think there’s a good chance I’ll vote for him (fingers pinched firmly on nose) in 2020. He’s still a long way from my ideal, but his enemies are positively wretched and genuinely scary.
#19 by Jon1979 is very interesting.