Last week I remarked to friends that if Donald Trump and
Hillary Clinton are the respective nominees of the Democratic and
Republican parties, Trump will win. On the other hand, she would beat
both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
Bernie Sanders would actually beat
any of the Republicans. But, ironically, since Clinton “owns” the
Democratic Party — it speaks volumes that no one except Martin O’Malley
and Sanders dared even run against her — he won’t get the nomination.I made this prediction before the Michigan primaries of March 8. Their results — Trump and Sanders were the winners — confirms my hypothesis, as I will explain.
The Republican “establishment” (aka the donors and moneybags) doesn’t want someone they can’t control. They would prefer the feckless Marco Rubio, who looks like he’s a high school kid memorizing his lines, or even the theocratic fire-and-brimstone Ted Cruz, to Trump.
They have thrown everything but the kitchen sink against Trump, including, outlandishly, trying to link this fairly moderate New York businessman with, of all things, the remnants of the southern racist Ku Klux Klan! And now we’re told he’s another Hitler!
One may hate Trump but it’s absurd to make him a “Nazi.” Such hyperbole would make it harder for people to see what a real fascist is, should one eventually emerge in America. Who will Trump be compared to next? Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot?
He’s also been called a racist and a clown. Yet he keeps winning, as he did in Michigan, taking even a large share of evangelicals, Cruz’s supposed strength.
Clinton would beat either Cruz or Rubio, and rather easily. But the Democratic Michigan primary, as well as earlier ones in the South, demonstrated that, while she has a lock on the African American vote, Bernie is clearly the favorite of white working class people, especially males, and genuine left liberals. To the surprise of pollsters and pundits, he won.
The Michigan voters supported Sanders because he’s a bona fide leftist willing to shake up the system and try to challenge the American plutocracy. They know Clinton is tied to Wall Street and the big banks and, along with her husband, has made millions of dollars in bribes (aka “speeches”) from them.
They see her as part of the elites who have been running — and ruining — the economy of the country over the past three decades. After all, it has been 24 years since her husband Bill won the presidency.
These voters are populists and nationalists. If Clinton becomes the Democratic standard-bearer, a big enough percentage of them will switch over to Trump if he’s the Republican nominee, just as many of their political ancestors became the old “Reagan Democrats” 35 years ago, while they would never cast their ballots for Cruz or Rubio.
Trump is, after all, an “outsider” and oddly non-partisan — part of the reason the Republican right wing hates him. But that will be his strength amongst secular disaffected voters. And they will hand Trump the keys to the White House in November.
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