tstorm823 said:
...republicans absolutely 100% cannot remove Trump from office and expect the MAGA crowd to go along with it. There are a lot of Trump people who don't like the Republican Party and a lot of Republicans who don't like Trump, if the two halves part ways, they're not going to just keep voting in line.
The scenario you're predicting only plays out one way: Sanders wins the nomination and can coax the moderate-populists who either stayed home, or voted Trump to upset the status quo, away from voting GOP.
Maybe Yang, but the only other one in the Democratic field who could have pulled that trick would have been Tulsi. Against an establishment Democratic candidate, including Warren, that doesn't happen and we see a repeat of 2016, except even worse because Pence is capable of disguising himself as a moderate Republican with mainstream and moderate/undecided appeal, and unlike Trump he's a
competent politician. Otherwise...
Agema said:
I would not underestimate the ability of such perceived betrayals to disgust a lot of hardcore supporters into abandoning the cause.
That's a pretty substantial misread of the tea leaves. Look at McConnell; the tea party wing (which still exists, they just ditched the colonial cosplay to put on MAGA hats) hates his ass with the burning passion of a dying star, and the stupider among them leap at every opportunity to try to primary, or at least dunk on, him. They still turn out for the ************ and circle the wagons around him, because no matter how much they hate him, he's entrenched and gets shit done. Bevin was tea party as tea party gets, enough to slug his way through the KY gubernatorial primaries and win the general election, but when he tried to primary McConnell he got absolutely curb stomped because the tea party was smart enough to learn from its primary shenanigans in 2012.
At the end of the day, Pence was on the ticket. He was the Trump-approved pick. The GOP can easily sell that as a net win to the MAGA crowd on the back of Pence's record as Indiana's governor alone. Pence tea partied so hardy he inadvertently kicked off an AIDS outbreak in the state for fuck's sake. The problem -- well, fringe benefit in some camps among the right -- is all that shit Antifa types and left-wing pundits spew about Trump, actually happens to be true for Pence.
Beyond that, establishment Republicans' and teabaggers' mutual hatred is vastly eclipsed by their common hatred of establishment Democrats.
ObsidianJones said:
The Democrats need to actually learn from the past. You can't leave one vote on the table. You have to see past your Party Bubble to those who aren't being catered to and embrace them.
Believe me, this is something I've been arguing since Clinton. The core issue is, that since Clinton introduced triangulation into Democrat-speak, Democrats continually try to appeal to the wrong ideological subgroup -- moderate Republican voters, not populist Republicans, not indies or undecideds. In other words, they've adopted rightward incrementalism based around soft selling policy positions to their own base while talking a big game on wedge issues, as opposed to hard selling traditional Democratic planks. That can be seen better no place else than the blue dogs' death and rebirth cycle under Pelosi.
If you could say one thing about the 2016 election in sum, it like its contemporaries in Europe and Latin America were wholesale repudiations of neoliberalism and neorealism. The Democratic party since Clinton has positioned itself to champion both, and in that context it's little surprise the party's on the ideological and philosophical ropes. Rediscovering its populist roots is what saves the party, not doubling down on the same hogwash that got it into the position it is now.
