By Florindo Volpacchio · Tuesday, October 27, 2020 Isaac Lopez’s comments in “Why Trump Will Win” anticipate Trump’s reelection as the result of a reactionary backlash by a conservative moderate public. This backlash is directed at a weak and failing leadership in the Republican Party and a Democratic Party that has abandoned the “silent majority” for the interests of minorities and women. Yet not only is it questionable whether this analysis of the backlash offers any insight, it is questionable whether the backlash is even representative of mainstream public opinion. There is more of a consensus for the progressive agenda than Lopez is willing to admit. The wealthy suburbs of New York are as much inclined to vote for a progressive Black gay candidate as a working-class district in Queens is inclined to elect a progressive Latinx. Most of all, let us not forget that even in the face of personal animosity, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes. So how does all of this square with the reactionary backlash of the “silent majority”?
As we all know, Trump won the presidency through the Electoral College by winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania with about 70 thousand votes. It is possible that the reactionary backlash in these states flipped them for Trump. But not only does this not make them representative of public opinion, given the fragmented, unverified, and biased sources that feed public opinion today; it is questionable whether the reactionary backlash is itself founded on serious grievances. With demographic inequalities shifting the balance of federal power to states less representative of the national consensus, the outcome of presidential elections is determined by a few states where local opinion, whether informed, uninformed, or dis-informed, can determine the long-term outcome of national politics.
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By Isaac Lopez · Thursday, October 15, 2020 Donald Trump will win in November because the same forces that propelled him to victory in 2016 are even stronger today in 2020. This year is shaping up to be the most turbulent in American history since at least 1968, if not 1941: we are living in the era of black swans. But if you keep spotting them, are black swans still so rare? Common sense dictates that Trump will lose resoundingly in November given the chaos of the past eight months, public fatigue from the last four years, and near-daily October surprises. Then again, common sense also dictated that Trump and his campaign would have gone the way of the 9-9-9 Plan and Original Mavericks within three weeks of descending the escalator at Trump Tower. At the risk of eating my own words in a bit less than one month, here is the quant- and wonk-free case for why Trump will win, poll numbers be damned.
The reason for Trump’s 2016 victory is simple: support of Donald Trump was and is a reactionary backlash against eight years of progressive overreach during the Obama administration and twenty-five years of weak Republican leadership. Donald Trump is crude, ill-tempered, unprofessional, and unfit to be president—much less a cultural figure—but was elected almost exclusively for these reasons. Contrary to the media catechism, Russia did not throw the election to Donald Trump, fake news articles from Macedonian click farms did not convince hordes of Baby Boomers on Facebook that Hillary Clinton leads a ring of satanic pedophiles, and 46.1% of voters in 2016 were not white nationalists. Trump won because a plurality of voters hated the elite class so much that they were willing to vote for such a man just to humiliate the GOP in the primary and the overall political establishment in the general. Trump’s victory was because of voters’ frustrations, and any retrospective analysis of 2016 applied to the current election year must start and end with them.
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