Dems really going to avoid yet ANOTHER contentious primary, it seems. You love to see it.
It seems MI/WI/MN Dems actually learned a lesson from 2016.
It's actually pretty incredible how Trump's win and narrative of Rust Belt strength (real though drastically exaggerated by the media) led to these three states' + PA's Democratic parties building absolutely behemoth organizations and their Republican parties to learn all the wrong lessons and crater.
I was thinking about something similar recently, but on more national lines. Elections come down to (a) successfully turning out your base voters (and hoping the other side is less successful at turning out theirs) and (b) persuading the persuadable voters. In 2016, Trump managed to both turn out lots of low-propensity Republican voters and to persuade some swing voters who were put off of Hillary, and the combination gave him a victory by the skin of his teeth. Credit where it's due to the Trump campaign for finding this strategy; it was one that looked unlikely to pay off, but it was the only one that
could have won for him, and it did.
However, the Republicans learned at least one critically wrong lesson from that victory: they thought, and some continue to think, that the same strategy that eked out a victory once is guaranteed to work again. They failed to realize that any set of actions creates consequences and reactions. Trump's term as President horrified so many people that in subsequent elections, it both activated Democratic base turnout and shifted many persuadable voters to the Democratic camp (even worse for the Republicans, the latter group includes high-propensity voters like college-educated suburbanites). Boosting turnouts from both bases is a contest that increasingly favors Democrats for demographic reasons. Trump staying in the spotlight, and many Republicans continuing to support him and his messages, just continues these trends.
The Republicans are like a poker player who once won a big pot by filling an inside straight and concluded that drawing to an inside straight is always a smart play. It's not; although the straight will
occasionally get filled (probability requires it), it loses much more often, and in the long run will lose lots of money. If the Republicans run on a platform that's focused on the economy and crime, de-emphasize the culture war stuff, and push Trump and other crazies to the side, they
can win; look at what happened in New York and California last November. However, to do this consistently on a national scale, they need to kick Trump & Co. to the curb. While this would certainly cause them some short-term pain, if they don't do it they're going to spend a long time in the wilderness.
