GOP Doomsday Is Coming: How the Dreadful Tax Bill Exposes a Republican Rift
On the morning of the presidential election last year, The Atlantic's Ron Brownstein wrote about some long-term trends in the electorate and the possibility that the 2016 race, with its distinctive odd features of a celebrity demagogue and the first woman nominee, might just accelerate the change. His thesis was that the unfolding electoral order would see the GOP relying on "preponderantly blue-collar, white, and older Rustbelt states that have mostly favored Democrats in recent years," while Democrats would "depend on white-collar, diverse, and younger Sunbelt states that as recently as the 1990s leaned reliably toward the GOP." He concluded the piece with what turned out to be a stunning prophecy:
The worst-case scenario for [Hillary Clinton] is that Trump’s blue-collar blitz narrowly pushes him past her in some of the Rustbelt states she needs, while she cannot advance quite enough among minority and college-educated white voters to overcome his non-college-educated, non-urban, religiously devout coalition in Sunbelt states like North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, and Colorado, much less Arizona and Georgia. Transitioning between her party’s past and future, Hillary Clinton’s nightmare is that she might be caught awkwardly in between.
Since the election we have had a flood of postmortems blaming everything from Facebook to Russia to racism, misogyny, bad campaigning and good old James Comey. I'd guess it could be any of those things plus a dozen more. Maybe all of them in some measure led to Trump's narrow victory in several states that won him enough votes in the Electoral College.
On the morning of the presidential election last year, The Atlantic's Ron Brownstein wrote about some long-term trends in the electorate and the possibility that the 2016 race, with its distinctive odd features of a celebrity demagogue and the first woman nominee, might just accelerate the change. His thesis was that the unfolding electoral order would see the GOP relying on "preponderantly blue-collar, white, and older Rustbelt states that have mostly favored Democrats in recent years," while Democrats would "depend on white-collar, diverse, and younger Sunbelt states that as recently as the 1990s leaned reliably toward the GOP." He concluded the piece with what turned out to be a stunning prophecy:
The worst-case scenario for [Hillary Clinton] is that Trump’s blue-collar blitz narrowly pushes him past her in some of the Rustbelt states she needs, while she cannot advance quite enough among minority and college-educated white voters to overcome his non-college-educated, non-urban, religiously devout coalition in Sunbelt states like North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, and Colorado, much less Arizona and Georgia. Transitioning between her party’s past and future, Hillary Clinton’s nightmare is that she might be caught awkwardly in between.
Since the election we have had a flood of postmortems blaming everything from Facebook to Russia to racism, misogyny, bad campaigning and good old James Comey. I'd guess it could be any of those things plus a dozen more. Maybe all of them in some measure led to Trump's narrow victory in several states that won him enough votes in the Electoral College.
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