Quote (Thor123422 @ 22 Feb 2019 00:04)
I think its going to be less and less so in the future. I mean I think the EC will still favor Republicans, but its not going to keep making a difference unless something drastically changes in american voting patterns or demographics. Those 70k votes that got Trump the EC is a pretty slim margin, I think its just as likely that Republicans begin to want election reform several presidential cycles from now as demographics continue to change against them.
If current voting patterns and demographic trends continue into the future, I really dont see how electoral reform could benefit the GOP.
I still think that the broader Trump agenda has a ton of appeal to a ton of voters, but isnt pulled off well enough by Trump himself. He was the right person to get certain ideas out there, but he's not the right person to actually carry these ideas out.
In the long run, I think the Republicans' greatest hope is that the current democratic coalition just cannot be held together ad infinitum. Poor minorities on the one side and college-educated whites who are globalization beneficiaries on the other side - at the end of the day, these two groups have VERY different economic interests. Currently, their coalition is held together by their shared cultural interests, which is also the reason why the Democratic party has in recent years shifted its focus more and more from economic/class questions toward identity politics.
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Still, I have no damn clue how 2020 will go. Trump has bread a lot of bad blood with his tariff since they hurt far more jobs that depend on foreign steel than steel workers were helped. He gets national points for "he saved these jobs" but in pretty much every case I've looked into the jobs were still shipped overseas and those people aren't going to forget it.
Might just come down to who Democrats put out again, if they put out another Clinton it might not matter.
My bet is that they will nominate Harris and double down on identity politics. The party establishment and their donor class clearly dont want to go too far down the Warren/Sanders route and will try everything to slow them down.