Old White Dudes

Greg Sargent lays out the Republican strategy for 2018 and presumably 2020.  In some ways, there are echoes of 2012 at play.  Back then, you might remember Karl Rove's epic meltdown on Fox News about the results from Ohio.  Rove's model had him convinced that Romney would win Ohio.  In reality, we know that Obama was able to motivate large numbers of young people and minorities that usually didn't vote. (And who didn't vote as much for Clinton.  Russia worked hard on that.)

Nevertheless the idea of the "Missing White Voter" took hold.  When the GOP establishment issued its "postmortem" on the election, they recommended moderating on social issues like immigration and race.  The GOP base told them to screw themselves and four years later coughed up an orange colored hairball on the carpet of the Oval Office.  Trump was vindication of the idea of the Missing White Voter.  Certainly Mitt "Bain Capital" Romney was a poor person to motivate these WWC voters to come out and vote. Trump tapped directly into their id in a way that Romney and McCain couldn't.  McCain, because he had a shred of decency, and Romney, because he was an android.

The problem with Missing White Voter strategy should be obvious to readers of this blog.  Those MWV are old.  Old people die or simply become unable to vote because of infirmity.  There are fewer of those voters every year.  Meanwhile, the suburban, college educated white women appears to be waking up.  Maybe she will still call the cops on the black real estate developer, but more likely, she's horrified that Sheryl called the cops on that guy.  Or the family having a BBQ in the park.  Or the people leaving their AIRbnb.  She's moving away from the GOP, because Trump horrifies her as a human being.  (And she's running for office, too.)

And finally, Trump won 46% of the vote.  That can't be repeated enough.  He won roughly same amount as Michael Freaking Dukakis.  He does not command the allegiance of the majority of Americans, and while his core supporters might not care, the Americans that hate him REALLY hate him and will crawl over broken glass to tear him down.