CORN, POPPED: Will 2020 Democrats Help Trump By Destroying Each Other?
Ed Kilgore in this piece repeats a bit of advice to the candidates from Steve Rosenthal: “Don’t try to stifle new ideas, new opinions, or new plans.” That’s encouragement to pitch the Green New Deal and other absurdities — not that this year’s crop of far-left candidates needs much prodding to do just that. Which might be exactly how to get more Trump.
But there’s also this: Trump’s Secret to Victory in 2020: Hispanic Voters.
Trump is making an aggressive play for Hispanic-American votes in Florida and beyond. Meanwhile, polls suggest Marist might have been onto something—and that Democrats should be worried that Hispanic voters could help reelect Trump and keep the Senate in Republican control. If so, it would be a cosmic twist of fate: A party that has staked its future on a belief that America’s demographic picture is changing decidedly in its favor could find itself losing to a man whose politics of fear should be driving precisely those voters into the Democrats’ waiting arms.
The second half of that graf is just silly. Illegals can’t vote (“Well…”), and legal immigrants are some of the fiercest critics of illegal immigration. And a big feature of Trump’s SOTU address was a push for less of the latter but more of the former. If Trump can continue to deliver on jobs and wages for legal immigrants, then it’s still “the economy, stupid.”
Going back to 2016, Trump won the White House largely by “stealing” white, blue-collar voters from Hillary Clinton in the Rust Belt. Since then, he’s pursued Hispanic and black voters more aggressively than any Republican since Reagan, and it isn’t even close.
The further left the Democrats push next year — and it looks like they’ll push very hard, indeed — the more secure the GOP base will become, aside from a very few remaining NeverTrump dead-enders. That would give Trump the liberty to spend more time and resources pursing voters which the Democrat nominee simply can’t afford to lose.
2020 is shaping up to be a fun, scrappy fight.