There are those who argue that Donald Trump can win the 2016 presidential election.
The theory is that that the kind of people that will vote for Trump are either
1) off the radar in terms of political polling, or
2) visible politically, but hide their enthusiasm for Trump.
There might be more of these people than anyone imagines.
It might be the case that Trump could win the popular vote, the way Al Gore did. But like Gore, Trump might still lose the Electoral College.
This is because the Electoral College is packed with old-school, establishment insiders.
Here is an example of an establishment Republican who is openly in support of Hillary Clinton.
(CNN)Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, received an endorsement Wednesday from a heavyweight foreign policy adviser to Republican presidents.
Brent Scowcroft, who served as National Security Adviser to Presidents George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford, and who worked in the White House of Presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, said Clinton "brings truly unique experience and perspective to the White House."
His endorsement was released hours after the Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump launched a broad attack on Clinton's experience, honesty and foreign policy experience in a 40-minute speech. Scowcroft directly rebutted Trump's claim that Clinton does not have the temperament to lead, citing her experience working on high-pressure issues such as Iran and Israel.
"She brings deep expertise in international affairs and a sophisticated understanding of the world, which I believe are essential for the commander-in-chief," Scowcroft said.
These are the kind of elite insiders who inhabit the Electoral College. If Trump should win the popular vote in, say, Florida, that state will send it's Republican delegation to vote in the Electoral College. But not all of them will vote for Trump. That is the whole point of the Electoral College: To sabotage populist movements institutionally.
This is the historical moment that our Founding Fathers were planning on when they created the Electoral College.
It is an un-democratic institution. That was always the purpose of the Electoral College.
The real question that this raises is, How many old-school Republicans will vote for Clinton ... and keep on voting Democratic?
The Republican Party is now transformed, and in tatters. If the Democrats offer the kind of "elite establishment insiders" like Hillary Clinton, some old-school Republicans might make it a habit to vote for them.
Conversely, Donald Trump's greatest supporters are registered as Democrats. These are poorly educated, small-town white Protestants. Now many of them may continue to vote Republican.
The real question.
The real question might be, Will there here may be a major re-alignment in the two parties, as there has been before?
Let's look at the old alignments.
North versus South.
There has always been a party of the North and a party of the South, this is a major demarcation.
The party of the north seeks centralization, while the south seeks decentralization. That was the story of the Civil War, when the North was Republican (centralists) and the South was Democratic (decentralists).
The New Deal.
The New Deal of the 1930s changed this somewhat. The Democratic Party -- the party of the South -- embraced the New Deal's centralism, whereas the Republican Party of the industrial and financial elites of the North rejected the New Deal and its centralizing tendencies. However, this still fits in with the South's conception of itself as 'rebellious', populist and anti-elitist.
The 1970s.
The next great change happened in the 1970s. The Republican Party under Nixon reached out to white Southerners and Roman Catholics. The South is now Republican. But this is in some ways a Republican Party that espouses de-centralization, whereas the Democrats since the New Deal have embraced centralization. It's not that Southerners have converted ideologically, so much as the Republicans have, at least rhetorically and superficially, adopted de-centralization and populism (e.g., George W. Bush, as opposed to his father).
East versus West.
Another geographic demarcation since the Civil War was conflict between the eastern and western regions of the United States, which again expressed itself as the conflict between elitism and populism. One can see this played out today in the conflict between the urban, liberal coastal 'blue states' and the more rural interior 'blue states' of the US.
There is a third and more recent demarcation based on geography, and that is the geography of upward mobility.
A new geography of political competition in the US?
Here is a map that illustrates how social mobility is lowest in 1) the southeastern US and in 2) the declining 'rust belt' areas of the northeast -- which excludes prosperous New England.
This map of social mobility rates corresponds with areas of support for Donald Trump (the south and the lower north), on the one hand, and Bernie Sanders (the west and New England), on the other.
This might be the new red-state, blue-state map. But even Texas is more upwardly mobile, and is not so interested in Donald Trump. They might vote for Trump to avoid Clinton, but there is no excitement for Trump in most of the big, successful states.
One thing that many observers are not noticing or admitting is that candidate Trump is speaking to the realities of white rural life, not just subjectively as it may feel to small-town folks, but also in terms of the actual, objective conditions of their existence that elites know nothing about.
One Ohio county has since 1964 voted consistently for the presidential candidates who ended up winning. It is now leaning toward Trump. They might not like Trump, but they are voting for him because all the other candidates seem to be out of touch with reality.
In a county in North Carolina in which the factories generally shuttered back in 2009, the only good jobs in town now are custodial, but those jobs belong to Mexicans. Trump's rantings about Mexicans and Chinese stealing American jobs is simply a fact of life in these areas. (One young woman in the story is walking around with an infant in her arms. She works three part-time jobs to get by. Interestingly, she has an MA degree. The notion of education as a panacea might be unrealistic.)
American ranchers along the Mexican border discuss the regular trespassing on their property by Mexicans. It used to be migrant workers, but no longer, now it is drug traffickers. They laugh at Trump's idea of a great border wall, but say that only Trump is discussing the reality that is their lives.
One thing that many observers are not noticing or admitting is that candidate Trump is speaking to the realities of white rural life, not just subjectively as it may feel to small-town folks, but also in terms of the actual, objective conditions of their existence that elites know nothing about.
One Ohio county has since 1964 voted consistently for the presidential candidates who ended up winning. It is now leaning toward Trump. They might not like Trump, but they are voting for him because all the other candidates seem to be out of touch with reality.
In a county in North Carolina in which the factories generally shuttered back in 2009, the only good jobs in town now are custodial, but those jobs belong to Mexicans. Trump's rantings about Mexicans and Chinese stealing American jobs is simply a fact of life in these areas. (One young woman in the story is walking around with an infant in her arms. She works three part-time jobs to get by. Interestingly, she has an MA degree. The notion of education as a panacea might be unrealistic.)
American ranchers along the Mexican border discuss the regular trespassing on their property by Mexicans. It used to be migrant workers, but no longer, now it is drug traffickers. They laugh at Trump's idea of a great border wall, but say that only Trump is discussing the reality that is their lives.
