Thirty-Seven Percent

Thirty-Seven Percent

Thirty-Seven Percent: that is the current approval rating for President Donald J. Trump.  If it requires somewhere near 48% of the electorate to win (though Trump won in 2016 with 46.4%) it would seem that the President should in some way be working to expand his thirty-seven percent.  But his apparent strategy is to “stick to his guns” and continue to do exactly what he has done to amplify his base, without reaching out to anyone else.

Mr. Trump has good reason to believe that all he needs is his thirty-seven percent.  He simply has to look back at the election of 2016; if he can replicate those conditions, he can be re-elected as a minority President. As a novice politician, it’s the only experience he has, and the complicated math of the Electoral College serves to benefit him.  

It takes 270 electoral votes to win the Presidency, and the electoral math leans Republican. Twenty-five states with 224 electoral votes are likely to vote Republican (including Ohio, Arizona, Georgia and Texas.)  Seventeen states and the District of Columbia are likely to vote Democratic (including Minnesota, Virginia and Colorado) totaling 216 votes. This is despite the fact that those same seventeen states have three million more people in them.  That amount, three million, should be vaguely familiar:  it is the nearly the same number of votes that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton earned over Republican Trump in 2016. 

That leaves nine “swing states;” 98 electoral votes as the determining factor.  The litany is familiar:  Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Nevada.  It is in the slim marginal differences in those voters that Donald Trump became President of the United States, and where he again hopes to prevail.

Mr. Trump has determined to ride two issues to his second term:  his contrived border crisis, and his potential impeachment.  Neither of these issues is likely to expand his voter base:  it’s hard to imagine undecided voters jumping onto the “I’m a victim being persecuted by the Democrats” bandwagon, or “lock migrants away and take away their kids.” But those issues will enflame his thirty-seven percent who will run out to vote to demand that the President, and the border, be walled off and protected.

Democrats are scared: afraid of the “Trump bogey man.” They are afraid that somehow that thirty-seven percent will turn into the majority of electoral votes once again, and they will wake up on November 4^th2020, to the nightmare of four more years. They are afraid of shadows:  the polls that don’t count Trump voters because they are embarrassed about their support, the power of the Christian right that supports a demonstrably immoral man, the shadowy Federalist Society that has gripped a majority of the Supreme Court, the cold thumb of Vladimir Putin on the scale of America’s electoral process. 

Democrats aren’t wrong to be afraid.  But as perhaps the most famous Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt said; “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  Democrats can’t be paralyzed by fear.  The election of 2018 showed that Americans will make other choices rather than follow the Trump drumbeat; the fact that Democrats now control the House of Representatives, despite the decade long effort of Republicans to gerrymander and suppress votes, shows what can be done.   What Democrats can’t do is become a common denominator to Trump.  Democrats can’t just scream that Trump is “cheating” by refusing to honor Congressional subpoenas and fighting every Congressional action in the Courts.  Democrats can’t claim to be “victims;” victimhood is the exclusive venue of Trump and the MAGA boys.

What Democrats can claim is that they are “upholding their duty.”  Democrats have a duty to protect the worker and the immigrant, the child and the senior citizen.  Democrats need to talk about healthcare, and improving wages.  They need to talk about protecting children at the border, but also improving American education.  They need to talk about helping improve lives for senior citizens, and protecting the environment for the future.

And Democrats also have a duty to protect our Democracy.  To do that, Democrats need to defend the Constitution against the incursions of the Trump Administration.  They need to protect the right to vote from state government’s suppression.  The need to protect those that struggle to protect themselves, from the LGBTQIA community to ethnic, racial and religious minorities.

In short, Democrats can travel many roads to the Presidency in 2020.  By “upholding their duty” to America, they can draw a striking contrast to “Trump victimhood.”  By doing their duty, Democrats and those who are undeclared in the middle or unmoored by the excesses of Trump; will come out to vote, inspired by a candidate rather than “holding their nose” to pick the lesser evil of two bad choices.  And if Democrats do this, then it won’t matter that the Electoral College leans red, or that voter suppression continues, or that the Supreme Court may allow the Census to be used as a Republican tool. 

In the end, Americans like heroes, not victims.  Democrats need to be heroic:  the contrast will do the rest.