Posted on 12/31/2019 4:31:47 AM PST by Kaslin
WESTBY, WISCONSIN -- In a country increasingly engaged in national politics and divided, the next 12 months may feel like 12 years. Voters in both trenches are eager to vote, convinced not only of victory but also of vindication. The shocking result in 2016 wasn't a black swan, an irregular election deviating from normalcy, but instead the indicator of the realignment we describe in "The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics," now available in a new a paperback edition in time for the 2020 election season.
The story of America's evolving political topography is one of tectonic plates that slowly grind against one another until a break notably alters the landscape with seismic consequences -- a sudden lurch long in development. The election of President Donald Trump cemented a realignment of the two political parties rooted in cultural and economic change years in the making. Although he has been the epicenter of all politics since his announcement of candidacy in 2015, Trump is the product of this realignment more than its cause, a fact that becomes clear as you travel the back roads to the places that made him the most unlikely president of our era.
Thirty-year-old dairy farmer Ben Klinkner doesn't consider himself a member of either political party. "I am a Christian conservative," he says matter-of-factly.
Sitting at conference table at the Westby Co-op Credit Union, the sixth-generation family farmer who has a master's degree in meat science explains that when he left to attend college at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, and then at North Dakota State University in Fargo for his master's, he vowed he would never milk a cow again.
"And I've been doing just that every day for the past six years," he said.
On Trump, Klinkner is pragmatic. "I am very happy with his policies. I just wish he'd put that Twitter down," he said of the president's unorthodox style of communicating. This cuts against the national media's narrative that farmers will dump the president because of the trade uncertainty.
And, yes, Klinkner will vote for him again.
Trump's 2016 victory came in spite of his historically weak performance in the suburbs long dominated by Republicans. The key was that he more than overcame his suburban weakness with the mass conversion of blue-collar voters in ancestrally Democratic bastions of the Midwest, and he inspired irregular voters who mistrust both parties. For "The Great Revolt," we traveled to the counties in the Great Lakes states that Trump wrested away from Democratic heritage to find examples of the voter archetypes that define the Trump coalition.
Large strata of the population are now not just eager to vote in the next race for president but eager to vote against the party of their ancestry. This enthusiasm for new alliances is perhaps the greatest indicator of lasting realignment.
The election of Trump glued populism to conservatism, an ideology long leavened by anti-establishment rhetoric but rooted in the inertial acquiescence to the status quo that comes with laissez-faire policies. In Trump, Republicans have embraced, or have been forced to embrace, a more muscular and activist approach on issues ranging from trade policy to nonstop legal warfare with liberal state governments like California's. Gone is the consistency of federalism, replaced in conservatism's pantheon with the base-motivating potency of perpetual confrontation.
The emotional exertion of Trump's combative approach continues to provide Democrats with avenues of appeal to buttoned-up suburbanites who otherwise resist liberal policies. And it has forced populists on the left to copy Trump's antagonistic style, elevating Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, the edgiest of the Democratic contenders for president, into front-runners.
Democratic populists seek to copy Trump's success but not to win back the same populist voters who flipped margins by 32 points from 2012 to 2016 in places like Ashtabula, Ohio, or 18 points in Erie, Pennsylvania, both of which we profiled in "The Great Revolt." Democrats such as Warren and Sanders have given up on winning those places -- and those Obama voters.
Instead, Sanders and Warren hope to emulate Trump's success with their party's version of the voters we called Perotistas, those whose participation in elections is irregular, even elliptical, and who pass into voting booths every decade or so like comets crashing into an otherwise orderly solar system, only to disappear just as abruptly.
For his part, the president has accepted his path, choosing not to broaden his appeal by tapering his temperament to one that might suit the two-income, two-degree Republican-leaning suburban families who split their tickets in 2016 and then chose Democratic congressmen in 2018. These voters crave predictability and civility at a gut level, two things in short supply in Trump's style, but they tell pollsters they are wary of the lurch toward socialism in today's Democratic Party. Thus far, their hearts have overpowered their heads in off-year elections in the Trump era, and Democrats are banking on the same result in 2020.
Whether or not the president ever turns his attention to winning over the voters who resist both socialism and his own style, other Republicans will be appealing to them. Suburban voters hold the keys to hotly contested 2020 Senate races in Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona and Colorado -- not to mention the entire slate of competitive House districts.
The suburbs may be where control of government will be decided, but the 2020 election will not be the end of the coalition Trump mobilized in 2016 or the resistance that formed in response. Why? Because the individualization of our cultural economy and the self-sorting of our communities will keep fueling distrust of establishment institutions and keep roiling our political and consumer behaviors. Establishment politicians, CEOs and journalists all ignore the dynamism of this great revolt at their own peril.
As mi-nute a segment as it is “the man on the street” jesse watters show tells THE TRUE STORY. questioned aboutv HISTORY, CURRENT EVENTS, PLACES, POLITICS AND THINGS IN GENEERAL THESE DOLTS INTERVIEWED KNEW LITTLE OF NOTHING! This is the voting public
Count on the Demonicrats to pull out the stops in fraudulent voting efforts in every precinct in every key electoral state.
The Demonicrats will have people placed in position of programming electonic voting machines, in printing extra paper ballots where those are used, in using Antifa intimidation tactics where some voters might try to vote for Trump, and in registering new voters from cemeteries and wherever. And don’t expect the fifth-column leftist media to be a watchdog for an honest election. The media will deep-six any reports of voting fraud or else put a GOP involvement spin on it.
I wish the GOPe would learn that the American worker is not the enemy.
To them, we are.
It’s not that the GOPe is anti union, I get that. What I have a problem with is they are anti worker in a general way. Name one thing the GOPe did to created jobs or help the middle class wage earner? It seems that wages for Americans cannot be driven low enough to satisfy the GOPe’s donor class.
The stunning indictment against “Our Corrupt American Oligarchs” is that Trump has done in just a few years what they have been telling us is impossible for decades.
I wish the GOPe would learn that the American worker is not the enemy.
If they haven’t figured that simple thing out by now, they aren’t ever going to learn it. It’s time to look at them for what they are, not as we wish they were.
I read somewhere that the first Democrat to combine Trump’s Nationalism with the Rat’s Socialism will be a big winner. Frightening, isn’t it?
GOPe = “Country Club” Republicans
If Trump wins in 2020....he needs to change the name of the party...
We must start this election year with the firm understanding that the only way the Democrat/Left can win the Presidency in 2020 is by cheating. With this unqualified understanding we must, throughout the coming year, take whatever actions necessary to protect our Constitution and our Republic from the Democrat/Left which is so clearly determined to destroy our Republic and any person or institution which supports Judeo/Christian and traditional American values. What has happened since November 2016 is unambiguous evidence of these undeniable facts!
Look, the people of this nation WANT nationalism mixed with a strong government which will suppress perversion and provide a robust safety net.
The two parties have a compact never to allow a movement or candidate who combines social conservatism with economic liberalism. In fact, the entire North Atlantic Deep State has an agreement, signed in blood in 1945, never to allow that.
But that was a long time ago.
I think what we are witnessing IMHO is both the Right and the Left turning their backs on a corrupt beltway elite. Whether it’s Trump’s right-leaning populism or Lizzie Warren’s public floggings for bankers, pretty much all voters have decided that whatever the governing class has been doing for the past 3 decades isn’t working for them.
Right now Trump’s movement is ascendant because most voters still lean right of center. I expect this will change dramatically though in about a decade when Millenials, who are apparently not ditching their love affair with socialism as they move through their 30’s, become an operative voting majority.
This battle will ultimately be decided by the Grim Reaper.
Reagan managed to pull it off.
Then the Bushes squandered it.
Trump campaigned on not cutting 'programs' like medicare and social security. Millennials have no power. Older people are in charge and running up the debt. The youth never voted for nafta, iraq war, china mfn, me intervention, and other adventures from hell. It is Trump and crew that are expanding the expense of .gov.
Well, thank “Trust the Plan” Jeff Sessions. He refused to back Kris Kobach’s Trump-initiated voter fraud initiative and force states to turn over their voter rolls. Kobach folded up his tent after a few months and quit, powerless.
Jeff Sessions has damaged this country in so many ways it’s hard to count. Vote fraud is laid at his feet.
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