Even if Donald Trump drops out tomorrow he’ll probably still have a lasting negative impact on our politics.
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I remain deeply skeptical that Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president this year, and even more doubtful that he would win if he is nominated or if he runs as an independent. Simply put, there hasn’t been a nominee like Trump in modern times, and I don’t see any reason to think that’s going to change this year. Add in the fact that the Republican Party by and large hates him, and I don’t see how he ends up in the White House.
But that hardly means we should all be treating him as a big national joke, because even if drops out tomorrow he still might have already caused lasting damage to our politics.
The reason is pretty simple, our political parties tend to “learn lessons” from presidential nomination cycles even if those lessons are the totally wrong ones to learn. A classic example of this is what happened to the Democrats in 1980’s where, after losing three presidential elections in a row, Democrats concluded that they had to “move to the center” on issues like taxes, crime and defense if they wanted to ever be competitive. A then highly influential paper for the Progressive Policy Institute summed this argument as:
The Democratic Party’s 1988 presidential defeat demonstrated that the party’s problems would not disappear, as many had hoped, once Ronald Reagan left the White House. Without a charismatic president to blame for their ills, Democrats must now come face to face with reality: too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments and ineffective in defense of their national security.
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This sort of analysis clearly had a big impact. Indeed well respected political writers are still citing things like Bill Clinton becoming “tough on crime” as why he avoided the fates of Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis.
The problem with this line of thinking is there’s no real evidence that it’s true. After all presidential elections are pretty predictable based on fundamentals like the state of the economy and incumbency. In other words the Democrats’ problems in the 80’s were largely due to Carter presiding over a bad economy in 1980 and thus losing while the Republicans ran in good economic years and thus won. After all once the economy started going bad for George H.W. Bush he lost to the guy with all “scandals” right?
How does Trump fit in? Well unless he melts down epically before Iowa lots of politicians will start “learning” that Trump’s brand of politics represents a way to win. Indeed, Republicans like Ted Cruz seems to have already learned that lesson. But this won’t just be a Republican problem. The fact that Democrats have been largely wiped out in recent election cycles in conservative and swing districts all over the country means that future Democratic politicians might think they need to appeal to that big “Trump block” the media assures us is out there. So while liberal activists might look at Trump and see a bigot and a blowhard, a Democrat running for state office in 2018 and who really wants to win in a moderate rural district might look at Trump’s polling numbers and decide that she too needs to take a tough line on “Syrian refugees on the lose.” The same way Hillary Clinton “learned” in the 1980’s that voters wanted their leaders to be “tough on crime.”
As Seth Masket put it in the Pacific Standard:
If Trump ends up being a major force in the general election, even if he comes in third, there will be considerable effort by the party system to address the wishes of his aggrieved supporters for future elections. And chances are, these efforts won’t involve rebuking or ignoring those folks, who have the policy preferences of Bill The Butcher but fewer concerns over political correctness.
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Source: 30dB.com – Donald Trump vs Donald Trump and Islam
While most likely you are correct in summation, I really don’t think you can blame trump for much of it. Trump is the result of failed democratic politics and policies that most are very knowledgeable about. The Clinton’s, especially this one currently running. The weak Obama administration that thumbs it’s nose at current laws and makes up junk as he goes along. His fact checking is horrendous. A democratic congress for most of this 2000s when it really counted and how they did nothing to support the economic base of this country-the solid middle class. They were as much to… Read more »