Why The Dems Will Lose in 2020: It’s Not Why You Think

Worst person in the world today is Jeet Heer at The New Republic. He says

A centrist Popular Front to fight the unpopular president would only demoralize Democrats and empower Trumpism.

That is the literal inverse of what would happen. Any defeat of Trump will excite Democrats and literally be a defeat of Trumpism. There are no Pyrrhic victories in politics. Maybe you come back stronger later, but in the mean time, the damage is done.

But the fact that there is a purity test coming from the left that is urging this as the True Way Forward is not something that is going to go away with debate. Perhaps, an exciting candidate like Obama was in 2008 will come along and we will all forget this.

What I suspect isn’t that Heer thinks that a Grand Coalition would strengthen Trumpism or demoralize Democrats, but that it would weaken leftists and their current grip on the Democratic party and make it less likely that the kind of policies he advocates for will come to pass. In other words, he would rather take a 5% chance we get Medicare for All versus a 45% change we repair Obamacare with the Public Option, times all of the other technocratic center-left remedies versus the radical left answers.

Of course, he can’t resist taking a shot at Hillary Clinton, saying that “this was tried.” That is probably the most fatuous comment in his fatuous article. Hillary has been polarizing from her days in the Arkansas state house. And, worse for Heer, she won the popular vote by enough to make it vanishingly likely that in a straight-up re-run another candidate who was less polarizing running on the same policies would lose.

Hillary—and this is coming from a staunch defender—was the problem, not her policies. Her policies were popular enough to win the popular vote. Her baggage cost her the electoral college. In fact, center-left Democrats have won the popular vote in all of the elections going back to 1992 except in 2004. Where is the evidence that better candidates (like Obama and Bill Clinton) can’t covert those ideas into wins?

There isn’t any. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that the opposite is true, but it won’t feed the leftist revolution, because good, effective government doesn’t feed revolutions.

Heer doesn’t want to win. He wants to beat them.