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But again, Trump will not bring the coal industry back. He can’t. The energy industry isn’t going that way. He can’t continue to win the favor of the rust belt when they can look at his record and see that he didn’t do squat for them. When he got elected, they thought he might; or at least thought there was a better chance he would than that Hillary would. But he won’t, and in 3 years, they will see that.
He got elected in part as a protest candidate, but as an incumbent, he can’t do that. In 2016 he had no record other than being a businessman. But now he is a politician, and he can’t oppose the status quo when he is the status quo.
Trump can distract his base from lack of industrial jobs by creating scapegoats such as immigrants, or the media, or the GOP establishment. He can just claim he was impeded in his agenda by the Washington elite and fake news. It wouldn’t be hard for him to get reelected as long as he keeps that one third loyal to him for the next three years.
No. You’re assuming that his base is the only political demographic that matters. Again, OBAMA WON TWICE. There are reasons why Obama won. Trump’s base didn’t just materialize from the ether. These people existed beforehand. They existed when Bill Clinton was elected twice and when Barack Obama was elected twice.
Why are you so adamant to insist that the (Neo)Nazis are taking over the world again? Trump did not win by a wide margin. He won Michigan by 0.3%; He won Ohio and Wisconsin by 0.7%. He didn’t win every state he won by huge margins. Some of them, yes. But not all of them.
And he was up against Hillary. Lots of people in this country HAAATE Hillary Clinton, and not merely because she’s a woman. They hate her because they view her as corrupt. They hate her because they perceive that she can not identify with their circumstances. They hate her because they think she commits crimes and gets away with it. Now, whether these things are true or not, it still speaks to their perspective. And she did nothing that alleviated it. When Debbie Schultz was accused of railroading Bernie and was kicked out of heading the DNC, Hillary immediately hired her for her campaign staff. When people confronted Hillary with questions about circumstances that cast her as corrupt, she deflected it. She kept on about why Trump would be horrible instead. To be sure, Trump is horrible and dangerous, but Hillary did nothing to MAKE HERSELF RELATABLE. That’s probably why when the Comey letter came out, her poll numbers dropped like a rock instead of people brushing it off. People were tired of her perceived shenanigans.
In any case, Trumps base alone does not win elections. I don’t know why you insist that they do, as though the Democratic Party is imploding with no chance of recovery. The Democrats just picked a bad candidate.
JEDIT: Let me be clear. I voted for Hillary–both in the general and the primary. I would have voted for Hillary in 2008 if Obama wasn’t running. But I can see how Hillary herself is out of touch with why she lost; and in so being, why her campaign was pretty much doomed.
Conservative republicans always vote. Also, the political climate of 2020 will be different from 2016, based on what damage the GOP does in the next three years. Remember that 2018 is going to be bigger advantage to republicans than democrats (and the public) realizes: less people will be able to vote thanks to more restrictive voter ID laws, which is also why Trump won margins in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. We are seeing mass disenfranchisement of black voters unseen since the Jim Crow era; the voting right act was hollowed out by the Supreme Court in 2013, and now the results are paying off. In a fair democracy the GOP knows its ideology is politically untenable, so they have to manipulate elections (allegedly as far back as 2004) and gerrymander states to stay in power. After four years of near-one party rule, the GOP will easily keep the white house in 2020, even if Trump has low approval ratings.
