New York Times: Progressives Should Appeal To Social Conservative Values To Beat Trump

A new study has found that in order to defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election the Democratic Party should be trying to win over moderate centrist voters like us.

New York Times:

“An influential analysis of national polling data by Professors Ellis and Stimson suggests that the most effective candidate in a national election would combine the most popular feature of the Democratic Party, progressive economic policies, with the most popular feature of the Republican Party: the invocation of conservative ideology and values like patriotism, family and the “American dream.”

But are candidates free to mix and match their policies with their symbolic politics? If a Democratic candidate pursued such a mixed strategy, would it work? Or would it make him or her seem hypocritical or incoherent? …

To investigate these questions we conducted two experiments, one using a nationally representative sample of Americans, in which we looked at Americans’ support for “Scott Miller,” a hypothetical 2020 Democratic nominee. The participants in our studies were presented with excerpts from Scott Miller’s speeches — but we systematically varied the content of the speeches to analyze the effects of policy platform and symbolic politics.

We found that the most effective Democratic candidate would speak in terms of conservative values while proposing progressive economic policies — with some of our evidence suggesting that endorsing highly progressive policies would be best. …

These results suggest that the most effective Democratic challenger to President Trump in 2020 would invoke conservative values while offering progressive economic policies. …”

I spent like four months this year (March, April, May and June) toying with the fantasy of an anti-Trump populist-progressive coalition. It all came to an end in a series of cringe moments when the Democratic debates started in June with the idea of dissolving our borders.

Do you remember the Yang Gang boomlet on the Dissident Right? Andrew Yang is still talking about $1,000 a month and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but his brand changed almost overnight from “interesting Asian political outsider talking about AI and offering $1,000 a month” to “just another liberal Democrat” who disappeared on the big stage.

If Trump is reelected in 2020, it will be funny to look back on this blog and chart how the winds shifted like a weather vane as soon as the national conversation turned to the minefield of social issues in the Democratic debates like open borders, transgenderism, confiscating guns and gendered pronouns. It honestly feels like at the moment that the Democrats are blowing it. Beto O’Rourke and Julian Castro never had a chance of being president but may have ruined it for the eventual nominee by pulling the party too far to the Left.