538: Maybe Trump Didn’t Remake The Political Map

[Technocracy Timmy]

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Not surprising. I've always been skeptical of this idea that college educated Romney Republicans will shift in any considerable way to the Party that's parading people like Warren and Sanders.

[Technocracy Timmy]

This trend was kinda going to be a one-time thing. There are no real successors or any other people who have the views that trump does. If a social conservative/Tea Party person (including Pence) gets the nomination in 2020 or 2024, things will easily revert to what they were.

Agreed. The idea that post-2016 the Democratic Party would become the upscale fiscally centrist Party while the GOP would morph into an economically populist working class Party never seemed to make any sense to me. The Democratic Party going back to Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt have represented working class voters with an economically populist platform. The GOP going back to the industrial northern business interests of Lincoln and McKinley have been the Party of economic classical liberalism.

I don't see a single election that saw only 6 states flip from 2012-2016 somehow undoing the entire 150 year history and structure of both Parties in such a drastic way. And of course, Trump now is governing so much like a standard Republican that even Mitch McConnell has openly said it's like having President Jeb Bush. And outside of killing a trade deal that was unlikely to pass anyhow; Trump is basically Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio in his policies. At the same time, you have people like Warren and Sanders driving the direction of the Democratic Party. I don't see any realignment happening with the possible exception of foreign policy.

[Technocracy Timmy]

I would disagree.   The white working class voters show the beginnings of voting like a minority group does.   It might only be the beginning of a new trend, but the trend is definitely there and the interests of those people are real too.  

The Democratic Party might be becoming too cosmopolitan/globalist for them and the traditional strength of the Dem party with those people are unions, and those are disappearing fast.

Maybe this would happen if Trump actually began governing like an economic populist, had a GOP congress that was willing to go along with that kind of agenda, 2016 was a realigning election, and the structures of both political parties suddenly switched after 150 years. Lower income and noncollege educated voters are much less likely to be partisan loyalists compared to  their college educated and higher income peers and are very swingable. Internationally, we just saw a similar event happen with many former UKIP voters going for Corbyn's Labour Party.

But none of that has happened or is happening. The recent special elections suggest that 2016 was a blip and that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Trump ran as a more isolationist, economically populist Republican which was definitely gonna create some bizarre trends but without any actual congressional support for his agenda plus Trump's unwillingness to commit to his agenda (see how Trumpcare compares to his comments on the campaign trail), this isn't going anywhere in the medium or long term.

[Technocracy Timmy]

I disagree with this, like I generally do with most of what 538 publishes. If Trump wins reelection, he will do it by recreating the 2016 map and coalition. For the most part, the 2018 and 2020 elections will see a continuation of 2016 trends IMO.

Well 2020 is probably a given if Trump is running since an incumbent's reelection map usually looks quite similar to their first map.

But I don't see this playing down-ballot at all when you look at the results of the recent special elections. You had GA-06 as lean D then Handel won by 3 points*. Enough upscale republicans are gonna give the middle finger every time to the Democrats no matter how much the DCCC tries to target them. They have no economic self interest in voting for Democratic representatives to go to D.C. and represent the agenda of Nancy Pelosi.

[Technocracy Timmy]

Handel only won by 3.6, not 5 points. This district used to be more Republican downballot.

Ossoff got less raw votes facing a non incumbent than the Democratic candidate running against Tom Price did in 2016. The idea that any significant number of anti-Trump republicans are flipping to the Democrats thus far has not been proven. And the Democrats couldn't have ran a more moderate candidate without alienating their base than Jon Ossof was. He opposed taxes on the rich, any step towards single payer, wanted to pursue defecit reduction, etc. If they can't win with this guy then they need to recognize that becoming a Fairfax, VA Party (which will alienate working class voters and progessives) will cause them to underperform nationally in 2018 and to lose outright in 2020.

[Technocracy Timmy]

^ By that logic we'd be waiting decades for the sunbelt to become competitive; so your analogy is incredibly faulty to begin with. Which Republican demographic group has Trump given the middle finger to the way LBJ did to white southerners when he signed the VRA and CRA into law? It cannot be Hispanics or millennials since neither of these groups have ever voted for a Republican. Is it upscale suburban Republicans? Because these voters are perfectly content so far with Trump abandoning his populist economic rhetoric (something they did not like about him) and pursuing tax cuts, deregulation, etc.

And don't try and argue that these voters are somehow less racist and less bigoted because they're wealthy or more cosmopolitan. They typically live in the most cookie cutter white flight suburbs imaginable for a reason. They're also just as likely as their lower income counterparts to be socially conservative which is why even here in this coastal republican suburb there's a church every 5 feet.

Nobody is denying that the sunbelt is trending D (because of minority and millennial growth; not some BS fantasy of upscale republicans voting Democrat down-ballot), but the special election results thus far have demonstrated that the rust belt has more short term potential than the sunbelt. That was the crux of the article and you seemed to have conveniently ignored that entirely. Do you have some kind of agenda to push? Or do you just seriously despise the idea of Democrats reaching out to working class white voters?

[Technocracy Timmy]

There are still 15-20 better Romney-Clinton opportunities out there, and special election results so far suggest that there are another 15-20 narrow Obama-Trump districts in Upstate NY and the Midwest that Democrats could easily win back.  I do think most places that voted for Trump by 5 or more are gone for good, even if they are historically Dem or have Dem incumbents, but there actually aren't that many House districts like that out there.

I think it's the exact opposite. Romney-Clinton voters are usually lifelong Republicans who either didn't like Trump because he was too uncultured (I.e. too overtly racist, xenophobic, sexist etc.) or wasn't a true conservative (too populist for their tastes). That's been the story with every Romney-Clinton voter I know ( I live in a clear cut Romney-Clinton district) and they have no interest voting Democratic down-ballot. They're too polarized and have no sincere interest in the Democratic Party platform. If the stock market stays high and their 401K's stay good and Trump (as Mitch McConnell recently noted) keeps governing more like Jeb Bush than a populist then they'll stick with the GOP down-ballot. The fact that many of them are wealthier keeps them from flipping as well.

Obama-Trump voters appear to be much more malleable and swingable. They were typically more working class "Reagan Democrats" in the Midwest and Northeast who can much more easily switch back to voting Democrat down-ballot (certainly much, much faster than Romney-Clinton voters).

[Technocracy Timmy]

Where is this meme coming from that Obama-trump voters are somehow gone for good? I mean many of these people have continually swung between the two parties throughout the past few decades, but apparantly now they've somehow become a unwinneable, core GOP consitisuentcy. I'm not buying it.

In my experience it depends on what you think the motive for voting for Trump was for these voters. A lot of people think former Obama voters were driven solely or overwhelmingly by racism and xenophobia. Never mind how many of them voted for Trump for his economic populism (and how many nonwhite voters broke for Trump for the same reason), his personality, generic change, sheer anger at Washington DC, etc.

A lot of people really want the next realignment to be a populist white working class vs. a more cosmopolitan college educated whites plus minorities faceoff. Why? It satisfies a lot of people's stereotypes of either side. Democrats get to smugly look down at the country bumpkins in the GOP while the GOP get to point at the Democrats being a bunch of out of touch smug liberals. This realignment won't happen for a variety of reasons, but it's a comfy narrative for people to think of as a way to stereotype the opposition Party.