Nevertheless, the paranoid style of the Republicans gave Donald J. Trump a decisive victory in the Electoral College in 2016. The paranoid style of the Republicans has been going full throttle ever since Trump entered the Republican presidential primary in 2016, and his most ardent supporters respond to it. Consequently, I still have the concern that I expressed in my OEN article "Trump Could Win in the Electoral College in 2020" (dated July 20, 2019):
Because the Republicans have relied so strongly on the paranoid style over the decades, the Democrats have shied away from it and also away from the apocalyptic style (i.e., the end of the world as we know it). But I am not necessarily recommending either the paranoid style or the apocalyptic style for the Democrats. After all, in the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Senator Obama deployed neither the paranoid style nor the apocalyptic style and he won. For most of the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama made promises about what all he would do if elected until the financial crisis of 2008 intervened and then he began talking about it instead. (Of course, in the past, both FDR and later LBJ campaigned on big-sounding promises.)
Thus far in the Democratic presidential primary, the contenders sound emphatically anti-Trump but their united anti-Trump stance does not phase Trump's most ardent supporters. But the Democratic candidates don't sound apocalyptic about four more years of President Trump. Similarly, Pope Francis' 2015 eco-encyclical sounds urgent, but it doesn't sound apocalyptic.
However, between now and the 2020 presidential election in November, the Democrats need to make a strong case in the states Trump won by a narrow margin in 2016 to motivate more voters in those states to vote for the Democratic Party's presidential candidate in 2020. But just being anti-Trump is probably not going to be enough for the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential candidate to win in the Electoral College.
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