The Party of Trump is about to be taught the same lesson that I learned from a decade of Libertarian Party activism. If you promote fringe beliefs you become an expensive, unelectable and thusly ineffectual governing machine. Without the majority of votes, votes you get from promoting popular goals, you cannot achieve the purpose of a governing body.
The purpose? Being given the authority to govern. That is why political parties exist. They don’t exist to perfect ideologies. They don’t exist to take the most extreme moral stands. They exist to govern.The Republican party has forgotten this fact. They forgot it when they became the Party of Trump. Kasich should have been the Republican nominee in 2016. In 2020 he is speaking at the Democratic National Convention in support of Joe Biden. That, in a nutshell, is why the Republican party will lose. They have even alienated the governors that they helped to elect in previous decades.
Trump won by a fluke of luck. Two people per precinct sat at home in Michigan in 2016, and Donald Trump became president. No one predicted it because it was a black swan event. An event that hinges on such a small possibility that the math simply can’t be generated to come up with that solution. Just like COVID-19 was a black swan event. A predictable and predicted event that could happen (and almost did happen twice during the Obama administration) could happen at any moment. With just the right virus and the wrong president at the helm of this country. The two events together spell hundreds of thousands of needlessly dead Americans. All of it Trump’s fault, whether he wants to take the blame or not.
Trump is underwater in popularity. His chances of winning in November are once again almost nil. He has no coattails to ride to success, and the Party of Trump is nominating the craziest of the crazies to become legislators, races that solely rely on garnering the majority of votes in their districts. Trump won because he didn’t need a majority of the population, he just needed to flip three Democratic states. When the legislative candidates lose the popular vote they don’t get to have the office, unlike Donald Trump who lost by three million votes but still won in 2016.
I only have two questions in mind for 2020. Will Trump lose in all 50 states? Will the Democrats secure the Senate with a solid majority of the seats? We won’t know for days, possibly weeks after the election. Weeks that Trump will use to spread doubt about the election results in an attempt to retain power. But if the vote is certified as a victory for Biden, then Donald Trump will cease to be president on January 20, 2021. On that day the Party of Trump will cease to exist. Maybe then the ideological purists will recognize their mistakes.
