Thirty-Seven Percent<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cstick to his guns\u201d and continue to do exactly what he has done to amplify his base, without reaching out to anyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s the only experience he has, and the complicated math of the Electoral College serves to benefit him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It takes 270 electoral votes to win the Presidency, and the electoral math leans Republican.\u00a0Twenty-five states with 224 electoral votes are likely to vote Republican (including Ohio, Arizona, Georgia and Texas.)\u00a0\u00a0Seventeen 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.\u00a0\u00a0That amount, three million, should be vaguely familiar:\u00a0\u00a0it is the nearly the same number of votes that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton earned over Republican Trump in 2016.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That leaves nine \u201cswing states;\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s hard to imagine undecided voters jumping onto the \u201cI\u2019m a victim being persecuted by the Democrats\u201d bandwagon, or \u201clock migrants away and take away their kids.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Democrats are scared:\u00a0afraid of the \u201cTrump bogey man.\u201d\u00a0They 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 4th<\/sup>2020, to the nightmare of four more years.\u00a0They are afraid of shadows:\u00a0\u00a0the polls that don\u2019t 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\u2019s electoral process.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Democrats aren’t wrong to be afraid. But as perhaps the most famous Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt said; \u201cthe only thing we have to fear is fear itself.\u201d Democrats can\u2019t 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\u2019t do is become a common denominator to Trump. Democrats can\u2019t just scream that Trump is \u201ccheating\u201d by refusing to honor Congressional subpoenas and fighting every Congressional action in the Courts. Democrats can\u2019t claim to be \u201cvictims;\u201d victimhood is the exclusive venue of Trump and the MAGA boys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What Democrats can claim is that they are \u201cupholding their duty.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s suppression. The need to protect those that struggle to protect themselves, from the LGBTQIA community to ethnic, racial and religious minorities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In short, Democrats can travel many roads to the Presidency in 2020.\u00a0\u00a0By \u201cupholding their duty\u201d to America, they can draw a striking contrast to \u201cTrump victimhood.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0By 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 \u201cholding their nose\u201d to pick the lesser evil of two bad choices.\u00a0\u00a0And if Democrats do this, then it won\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the end, Americans like heroes, not victims. Democrats need to be heroic: the contrast will do the rest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"