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If someone like @HowardSchultz or @MikeBloomberg ran as an Independent & there was no @JohnKasich to balance it out, Trump would almost certainly win another term. And maybe even WITH a Kasich or @LarryHogan to balance things out. Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line
This is exactly what happened in 2016. That part of my @nytopinion had to get cut out for length, but 3rd party defection or so-called "protest voting" is what swung the Electoral College to Trump in 2016, NOT movement of white, working class voters. WWVs have been moving away
from Democrats for decades over gender, race, and cultural issues and it is these issues, not economic issues, that were predictive in trump support in 2016 (controlling for party). Trump's victory wasn't a resounding rejection of the so-called regular order...
it was the political equivilant of a freak accident powered in large part by the defection of idealistic liberals from the Clinton/Kaine ticket bc they saw the election as a shoe in and bc they saw the threats from Trump as abstract. Now those threats are tangible (as I argue in
in the op-ed) and they will come home. BUT the one thing that could seriously disrupt this (other than a global catastrophe say) is a well-resourced, well-respected, well-qualified left-leaning Independent, especially because no matter which faction the prevailing D nominee hails
from he or she is going to have to embrace a progressive platform & the party has shown few signs that it yet understands how important "pride in platform/ideology is to persuadable voters. As such, I could see a lot of pick off in some scenarios, most esp if Sanders is the nom.
In a fractured GE field, anything is possible and the ability of the Republican electorate to rally around first Trump and later Roy Moore tells me that a Bloomburg might be more successful siphoning off votes from the left half of the spectrum than a Kasich would be on the right
True, the left half would still benefit from being the side locked out of power and even more so from a situation where the incumbent is facing multiple felonies. Negative partisanship *could* discourage voters from risking defection. That *could* is a hell of a gamble for the
left to take. I expect the pressure on Schultz and Bloomsburg to not run as Independence to be massive.
