How Democrats Can Win with a Mandate in 2020, and Why They Likely Won't

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So how can the Democratic Party claim victory from the jaws of opportunity in 2020? By offering an actual change candidate of their own to run against the Republican fake. By running alongside the crowd that still wants to overturn the Establishment, and not against it. By offering someone real for change voters to vote for.

By offering, in other words, the 2020 version of Bernie Sanders.

Frank again:

JW: How can we defeat this phenomenon once and for all? Don't we need a progressive like a Bernie Sanders who would raise the minimum wage, make college tuition-free, bring Medicare for all -- and actually make life better for ordinary middle- and working-class people?

TF: Yes. I don't want to put any proper names on it, like a certain senator from Vermont, but the bottom line is this: If the economy booms and wages go up, it's going to be hard to beat Trump in three years. The Democrats cannot stick with the Clinton and Obama approach where you identify yourself with what I like to call the ideology of the 1990s, the "catechism of tech, bank, and globe," as I say in the article. There's really only one set of successful politics for an age like this one: It's the politics that we identify with the party of Lyndon Johnson, the party of the New Deal. What Trump has offered is a kind of weird replica of that. But as I have said many times, the real thing would beat the fake.

"The real thing would beat the fake." In 2016 Republicans offered a fake populist, and the Democrats offered a fake Republican. In that contest of fakes, the populist won ... barely. The first party to offer a real populist to the same electorate will sweep into office with a mandate.

Will Democratic Party actually offer such a candidate, offer the "next Sanders" or even the last one, to 2020 voters? Not as currently led.

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