The Narrative

The WaPo has an exhaustively long Cleetus Safari in today's edition.  This one, at least, is talking to people whose support for Trump is softening some.  I've always felt that incumbents often win re-election because people don't want to admit that they may have made a mistake when they elected the person in the first place.  Trump can't win re-election without expanding on his 46% vote total from 2016.  Democrats will - hopefully, I mean they're Democrats - rally around a standard bearer, and the marginal candidacies of Jill Stein and Ron Johnson shouldn't siphon off votes.

Trump cannot, will not and has not grown that 46%.  As they are older, there will be fewer of them in 2020 anyway.  His temperment has turned off quite a few suburban moderates, people who are largely absent from the media's interminable series of Cleetus Safaris to the Rust Belt.  If a re-match were held of the 2016 election today, I think Clinton wins, because she gets bigger margins in the suburbs of Philly, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Milwaukee, plus larger minority turnout.

As Trump hovers perpetually around 37-40% approval, the question inevitably becomes "Where is his floor?"  Right now, a majority of Republicans think the FBI is framing the President of the United States.  That's insane, but they believe that.  What the WaPo article gets at is those who may have voted for Obama in 2008, but switched to Trump, precisely because he was an iconoclast, precisely to shake up a system that wasn't working for them.

Given how impervious most Trump votes are to evidence, it will be interesting to see if they can hear this piece of news.  As Jon Chait lays out, Trump has retreated from every economic populist promise he made during the campaign.  His administration is already the most corrupt in American history (if half the allegations are true).  The twin narratives of corruption and betrayal - "Trump lied to you, it's not your fault" - are a compelling story to bring to voters.  You don't have to promise impeachment or miracles, just honestly and clean government.

You aren't going to win rural House seats very often, if you're the Democrats.  But you have to decrease the margins that Trump ran up in the countryside.  That's how you hold on to Senate seats in West Virginia, Indiana, South Dakota and Missouri. 

Run against the corruption, nurture the narrative - not that they are racists, even if they might be - that Trump lied to them to enrich himself and his other millionaire friends.

That's the stuff of a Blue Wave.