Will 2020 be a Re-alignment Presidential Election?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

The 2020 American presidential contest may prove to be a re-alignment election. Should Donald Trump decide to run for a second term – something not entirely certain – the Republican establishment might deny him the nomination. They might once again turn to Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush.

If that happens, Trump might do what Theodore Roosevelt did in1912: run as a third-party candidate against his own party.

This would guarantee a Democratic victory, though Trump might run second and the regular Republican third.

It might prove the end of the Republican Party as presently constituted. A new “Trump”-style party, very nationalist-populist, would emerge, while many anti-Trump Republicans would drift over to the Democrats.

The same thing happened in reverse in the 1960s -70s, when southern racists and segregationists left the Democratic Party for the Republicans.

The 1860 election, won by Abraham Lincoln in a four-way race, resulted in the demise of the Whigs. It also precipitated the American Civil War.

As for the Democrats, given their electoral base, they will try to nominate a woman of colour, preferably someone relatively young. 

They have some excellent choices at the moment. Their prime pick might be the current junior U.S. senator from California, Kamala Harris. 

Elected in 2016, she is the first woman of Jamaican and South Asian descent in that body. 

Her mother, a Tamil woman from India, was a prominent breast cancer researcher, who emigrated from Chennai, in 1960. Her father, a Stanford University economics professor, emigrated from Jamaica in 1961.

The family lived in Berkeley, where both of Harris' parents attended graduate school at the University of California, and they took Harris to many civil rights protests. Later she lived in a predominantly African-American neighbourhood in Oakland.

Harris is a graduate of Howard University, America’s oldest historically Black university. She then earned her law degree from the University of California’s Hastings College of Law.

She was also the first African-American woman to serve as California’s Attorney General. In that position, she defended the rights of consumers, winning major settlements holding big corporations accountable and forging innovative agreements with the technology industry to protect the privacy of Californians and fight online crime.

She prosecuted transnational gangs that exploited women and children, and trafficked in guns and drugs. She led comprehensive studies and investigations into the impacts of transnational criminal organizations and human trafficking in California.

In the U.S. Senate, she currently serves on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Select Committee On Intelligence, Environment and Public Works Committee, and the Committee On Budget.

Harris has come out in support of single-payer health care and free college tuition for families earning less than $140,000 a year. She has cosponsored bills to raise the federal minimum wage, and to stop new oil and gas leases as well as the renewal of old ones in the Arctic Ocean.

Another possible nominee might be Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Elected in 2012, she represents Hawaii’s Second Congressional District in the House of Representatives and is the first Samoan American and first Hindu member of Congress.

A Pacific Islander, Gabbard was born in Leloaloa, American Samoa, the fourth of five children born to a Hindu mother and a Catholic father. At the age of two, the family moved to Hawaii.

As a member of the Hawaii Army National Guard, she volunteered on two tours of duty to the Middle East. She served in a combat zone in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was deployed to Kuwait from 2008 to 2009.

She has denounced regime change wars like those in Iraq, Libya and Syria, and has opposed the U.S.-led removal of Bashar al-Assad from power, arguing thatSyria’s civil war is a source of the Syrian refugee crisis.

During the 2016 Democratic Party primary race she emerged as a strong backer of Bernie Sanders and at the Convention in Philadelphia she gave the nominating speech putting his name forward. This will endear her to the party’s left-wing.

Rising Democratic stars, Harris and Gabbard embody the future the party would like to imagine for itself.