Homeopathic Populism

Raspberry peach pie via Taste of Home.

I'm so tired of this hoary and false take on the 2016 election, as from Monsignor Ross Douthat ("Midterms Deliver an American Stalemate"):

Instead, after its nominee traded a lot of suburban voters for stronger working-class support in 2016, the Trump-era Republican Party has continued to hemorrhage suburbanites while also giving back some of those Midwestern, blue-collar gains. The political strategy for Republicans after Trump’s victory should have been obvious: Seal the working-class realignment with a dose of economic populism, hold the suburbs by dialing back the Trumpian excesses. Instead the president let congressional Republicans have their way on policy, and they let him be himself in other ways — which makes the Democratic sweep in the House exactly the outcome that both the soon-departing Paul Ryan and the president deserve.

Suburbia voted Trump by a 5% margin two years ago, compared to 2% for Romney in 2012:

Suburban voters particularly put Trump ahead in the crucial Midwestern states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and came close to winning him supposedly deep blue Minnesota. This is where the Democratic falloff from the Obama years was most evident, notes Mike Barone, falling from  dropping from 54 percent for Obama to 2008 to 45 percent [in 2016].

In fact people who work with their hands are allowed to live in the suburbs nowadays, perhaps contrary what the Monsignor has heard. It has actually been going on since the 1940s.

I love that concept of a "dose" of economic populism. It's a theory of homeopathic political medicine. You hold off revolution by administering tiny, almost undetectable gestures, like the Marco-Ivanka childcare proposals.

As to the reining in of "Trumpian excesses", does he think they haven't tried?

What about Democrats? If Republicans just spent two years squandering a chance at a populist realignment, their rivals spent Election Day proving that they have solved some of their Obama-era problems — midterm turnout, above all — without finding way to turn a popular-vote advantage into the Senate majority that, no matter how unjust liberals increasingly find the existence of the Senate, they still need to somehow win.

It's been obvious since long before the campaign started that the particular third of the states electing Senators this year were the wrong batch for Democrats. It's like when you go to the greenmarket during peach season and Ross says "Birkenstock-wearers still haven't found a way to turn flour, fat, fruit, and sugar into pumpkin pie." Just go away, please.

Bonus: I don't need to bother with Mr. Bret Stephens:

This is how Bret Stephens describes an election in which Democrats flipped the House with at least 29 seats, took well over 300 state legislative seats, and took seven governorships. https://t.co/oZ545kYk4y pic.twitter.com/xuKaXs5Tr3

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) November 8, 2018