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Edsall explores new research on whether the Democratic Party could find more success focusing on race or on class when trying to build support. Maureen Dowd writes that Biden has “a very narrow window to do great things” and shouldn’t squander it appeasing Republican opponents.
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Jamelle Bouie wonders whether voters will accept a party “that promises quite a bit but won’t work to make any of it a reality.”.Ezra Klein writes that “midterms typically raze the governing party” and explores just how tough a road the Democrats have ahead.Opinion Debate Will the Democrats face a midterm wipeout? Lacking these traditional credentials, Trump sought out “the underserved market within the Republican electorate by giving those voters what they might have wanted, but weren’t getting from the other mainstream selections.” When Trump got into the 2016 primary race, “he did not have a clear coalition, nor did he have the things candidates normally have when running for president: political experience, governing experience, or a track record supporting party issues and ideologies,” Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, wrote in an email. Trump’s success in transforming the party has radically changed the path to the Republican presidential nomination: the traditional elitist route through state and national party leaders, the Washington lobbying and interest group community and top fund-raisers across the country no longer assures success, and may, instead, prove a liability.įor those seeking to emulate Trump - Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, for example - the basic question is whether Trump’s trajectory is replicable or whether there are unexplored avenues to victory at the 2024 Republican National Convention. But this faction has been around longer than our current partisan divide.” In fact, “they are not loyal to a party - they are loyal to white Christian domination.” Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, makes the case via Twitter that Trump has “served as a lightning rod for lots of regular people who hold white Christian supremacist beliefs.” The solidification of their control over the Republican Party “makes it seem like a partisan issue. The segregationist segment of the electorate has been a permanent fixture of American politics, shifting between the two major parties.įor more than two decades, scholars and analysts have written about the growing partisan antipathy and polarization that have turned America into two warring camps, politically speaking. With all his histrionics and theatrics, Trump brought the dark side of American politics to the fore: the alienated, the distrustful, voters willing to sacrifice democracy for a return to white hegemony. In 2016, Donald Trump recruited voters with the highest levels of animosity toward African Americans, assembling a “schadenfreude” electorate - voters who take pleasure in making the opposition suffer - that continues to dominate the Republican Party, even in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.
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