The Democrats could learn a lot by reading his post-mortem of the 2016 election.
Good article.
5.56mm
Well not so fast. Early on, Hanson WAS a neverTrumper who finally, grudgingly, saw the light. This had to hurt to write.
He is correct that NO other candidate could have won this. They would have wilted at the first nasty attack. And NO other candidate, including Cruz would have appealed to those PA/MI/WI/IA voters.
Trump didn’t tear down or tear up the Republican Party. He simply used it to put an (R) after his name for identification. He ran WITHOUT the Republican Party and ran WITH the people of his new movement. The Republican Party is fully intact, just sitting there rotting as it was when he started this whole gig.
I figured this out a year ago. I predicted that Trump would win the nomination and surmised that he had the best chance of winning the general election against Hillary Clinton. VDH hits two of the key reasons--(1) He could draw blue-collar voters who were not traditional Republicans (2) He is a street fighter. And we needed that to take on the Left Wing Hate Machine.
Wow, what a fantastic essay. Top notch.
“The more Clinton played the identity politics card, the more she earned fewer returns for herself and more voters for Trump”
Very astute analysis from Mr. Hanson.
this is a tremendous article. I think the NeverTrump types may not have all been necessarily anti-Trump at heart; they were so deathly scared of more Republican POTUS losses, and were just scared that the media would easily eviscerate Trump. Our record from 1992-2012 (inclusive) was 2 for 6; I can’t hate the ones for whom it wasn’t truly personal, but just wanted to avoid making it 2 for 7. 2 for 7 is less than a third: the kind of vote total Hillary got in West Virginia, which Bill Clinton won by double digits twice, most recently in 1996, 52%-37%.
It’s always great to have the perspective of people you respect and trust and who are consistent like Hanson and Rush to add perspective in good times and bad.
Trump’s Republican critics variously disparaged him as, at best, a Huey Long or Ross Perot, whose populist message was antithetical to conservative principles of unrestricted trade, (open-border immigration???), and proper personal comportment. At worse, a few Republican elites wrote Trump off as a dangerous fascist akin to Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler.
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Since when is it a conservative principal to ignore the immigration laws and permit open borders?
“The Democratic Party is now neither a centrist nor a coalition party. Instead, it finds itself at a dead-end: had Hillary Clinton emulated her husband’s pragmatic politics of the 1990s, she would have never won the nomination—even though she would have had a far better chance of winning the general election.”
Best part is, they did it all to themselves.
“The old blue-collar middle class was bewildered by the leftwing social agenda in which gay marriage, women in combat units, and transgendered restrooms went from possible to mandatory party positions in an eye blink. In a party in which “white privilege” was pro forma disparagement, those who were both white and without it grew furious that the elites with such privilege massaged the allegation to provide cover for their own entitlement.
Haha. He got their f@#$ing number.
In the aftermath of defeat, where goes the Democratic Party?”
STRAIGHT TO HELL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And good riddance.
Suggestion for Article of the year! BTTT.
Scott Adams Blog - The Cognitive Dissonance Cluster Bomb
Hanson's a rear running creep.
There will be now endless articles and news items why what happened happened. I like to keep things simple and have said in years past here on FR that the most likeable candidate wins. Policies really don’t matter to the mushy middle who decide elections. My theory was sorely tested in the two 0 elections but maybe indeed for the US electorate he was more media likeable than McCain and Romney. In this one you had Trump and H who both had pluses and minuses although from our perspective here at FR H was close to the devil. Given those pluses and minuses for both the vote was close but Trump flipped enough states to win the EC.
One could say it was the tireless work Trump did or his talking about issues that mattered to the rust belt states which gave him victory but one could argue he was just a bit more likeable than H where it counted in those states he flipped. He also showed up at rallies in those states a lot more than H and maybe that made him more likeable on that factor.
So yes, this was a fairly vigorous dig at NR as well as a fair articulation of what went into this very strange campaign.
The old blue-collar middle class was bewildered by the leftwing social agenda in which gay marriage, women in combat units, and transgendered restrooms went from possible to mandatory party positions in an eye blink. In a party in which “white privilege” was pro forma disparagement, those who were both white and without it grew furious that the elites with such privilege massaged the allegation to provide cover for their own entitlement.
Bingo. To have a spokeswoman as fantastically privileged as Hillary Clinton, lifelong apparatchik and multimillionaire on the public teat, shaking her finger at West Virginia coal miners as insufficiently appreciative of their privilege was probably the worst example of projection I've seen in a lifetime of political observation. And she was perfectly serious. 0bama's is a government of, by, and for wealthy social activists, and it didn't take all that long for the voting public to become sick of its pretensions. They're still out there, though, and they're furious.
