British exit polls on Thursday
The clear rejection of Labour’s big-government socialism also looks ominous for Democrats who believe the party can lurch left and win.
- Roger Cohen in today's NY Times editorial
Lurch left? Really?
I'm so tired of pundits like Roger Cohen replacing facts with their half-baked understanding of ideology to make dire predictions that Trump will win again in 2020. We see these editorials every week. But to make such a prediction is to ignore facts nearly as willfully as the frothy-mouthed Republicans during the impeachment hearings.
First, Trump doesn't top 42% in any of the respectable general election polling. And while such early polling is often dismissed, a) it is worth more for an incumbent with 100% name recognition and b) this figure has stayed remarkably steady for over a year, and is almost identical to his typical approval rating. It's his rally crowd base.
But he can't win with 42%. In fact, if that's what he gets, the election will be a Democratic landslide. For reference, Walter Mondale got 41% in 1984 and won only one state. Jimmy Carter also got 41% in 1980 and won six states. And Michael Dukakis got 45.6% in 1988 and won just 10 states.
Second, the Trump campaign hasn't made even a token attempt to appeal to voters outside this depraved minority. He appears to believe that his base alone will turn out in such numbers that the moderates who abandoned him for Democrats in 2018 won't matter.
But Democrats and moderate Republicans, repulsed by Trump, will turn out in historic numbers. It is expected that as many as 170 million people will vote in the 2020 general.
Third, none of the leading Democrats have an image anything remotely as toxic as Jeremy Corbyn. None have the kind of negative image that Hillary Clinton did. None have been subjected to the quarter century of right wing propaganda that she endured.
Fourth, “lurch left” is ludicrous beyond belief. There are dozens of polls showing that policies such as Warren’s are supported by large majorities of the electorate.
It gets worse:
I still think Trump can be beaten, but not from way out left and not without recognition that, as Hugo Dixon, a leader of the now defeated fight for a second British referendum, put it: “There is a crisis of liberalism because we have not found a way to connect to the lives of people in the small towns of the postindustrial wasteland whose traditional culture has been torn away.”
Once again we have the argument that Democrats can’t win without winning some of Trump’s base. Oh, if only we understood the poor white working-class voter!
Well, that’s nonsense. And again, math-challenged.
