Trump might not have sky high approval ratings. Never Trumpers like Bret Stephens don’t think Trump should be re-nominated by the Republican party in 2020. But this all might not matter. The Democrats have moved too far to the Left, according to Bret Stephens in his latest New York Times column, The Most Successful Economic System Shouldn’t Be a Dirty Word.

John Hickenlooper ought to be a poster child for American capitalism. After being laid off from his job as a geologist during the oil bust of the 1980s, he and his business partners turned an empty warehouse into a thriving brewery. It launched his political career, first as a problem-solving two-term mayor of Denver, then as a pragmatic two-term governor of Colorado, and now as a centrist candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Yet there he was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” squirming in his seat as Joe Scarborough asked if he would call himself “a proud capitalist.” Hickenlooper protested the divisiveness of labels. He refused to reject the term “socialism.” He tried, like a vegetarian who still wants his bacon, to have it both ways: “There are parts of socialism, parts of capitalism, in everything.”

But Hickenlooper did allow this: “We worked 70, 80, 90 hours a week to build the business; and we worked with the other business owners in [Lower Downtown Denver] to help them build their business. Is that capitalism? I guess.”

He guessed right.

Forget about it, Bret. The Democrats aren’t going to nominate someone like John Hickenlooper. They are much more likely to nominate a socialist like Bernie Sanders.

I agree with Stephens that Capitalism is really the only economic system that delivers high living standards to the masses, not just the Castros and the Stalins and the Maos.

Today, despite Friday’s disappointing jobs report, unemployment in the United States clocks in at a rock-bottom 3.8 percent. Wage growth, at 3.4 percent, is at a 10-year high. The median household income is as high as it has ever been. The United States is the world’s most competitive economy, as well as the wealthiest once you exclude small countries like Qatar.

None of this should be difficult to celebrate. An economy in which private property is protected, private enterprise is rewarded, markets set prices and profits provide incentives will, over time, generate more wealth, innovation and charity — and distribute each far more widely — than any form of central planning.

This is not a theory. It’s as true in Nordic countries like Denmark (often mislabeled “socialist”) as it is in hyper-capitalist Singapore. It’s the empirically verifiable conclusion from the 20th century’s bitter contest between capitalist and socialist states. It’s not a race we should have to run twice.

Stephens thinks this might clinch re-election for Trump in 2020.

Donald Trump is gearing up to run a campaign based on a thriving economy (check), a country at peace (check), a mess of congressional investigations that will quickly confuse and bore the public (check), Democrats who want to turn Silicon Valley into a giant utility (check), an inconclusive Mueller report (likely check), and a Democratic Party that can neither bring itself to censure an anti-Semitic congresswoman nor publicly embrace the free-market system (check, check).

Democrats still seem to think 2020 is going to be a referendum on the president. It’s not. It’s going to be a choice. Right now, the Trump campaign could hardly ask for a bigger favor from its overconfident opponents.

The Democrats are going to blow it, and even some Never Trumpers know it.