The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Democrats and the ‘Sailer Strategy’

Posted on | March 12, 2019 | Comments Off on Democrats and the ‘Sailer Strategy’

 

We cannot predict the future, and the 2020 election is still 18 months away. President Trump’s approval numbers appear stable — not necessarily good, but stable — however, if we believed the polls, there was never a chance Trump could have been elected to begin with. Let’s put it this way: If Rahm Emmanuel thinks Democrats are in a bad place, maybe thinks aren’t looking so good for them. Even while the daily headlines are full of controversy, we need to focus on the underlying political reality:

More than a decade ago, when Karl Rove and other “center-right” Republican Party strategists were talking endlessly about the need for GOP “outreach” to Hispanic voters, Steve Sailer examined the same electoral data and reached quite a contrary conclusion. The weakness of Republicans — exposed by the razor-thin margins of George W. Bush’s elections in 2000 and 2004 — was not due to their lack of support among minority voters, Sailer argued, but rather that the GOP was failing to maximize its share of the white vote. Contradicting the conventional wisdom within the Republican establishment, Sailer’s argument attracted little attention from the mainstream media until after Donald Trump stunned the nation with his upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
How had Trump, despite all his flaws and disadvantages, managed not only to capture the Republican nomination against a field of formidable rivals, but also to defeat Clinton in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan that had not been carried by a GOP presidential candidate since 1988? Suddenly, Steve Sailer was hailed as a prophet. Sailer had “seemed to exercise a kind of subliminal influence across much of the right,” Michael Brendan Dougherty declared in July 2016, after Trump locked up the Republican nomination, and Michael Barone cited Sailer’s ideas in a December 2016 analysis of the election. In April 2017, New York` magazine called Sailer “The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right.”
Whether or not President Trump and his advisors have consciously acted on the “Sailer Strategy,” the results have been almost exactly what any student of Sailer’s work might have predicted. And the behavior of Democrats in recent months may foreshadow another Trump victory in 2020. Quite simply, Democrats have doubled down on their left-wing identity-politics message and, in the process, further alienated the kind of white voters who helped Trump beat Hillary in 2016. . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.



 

Category: Donald Trump, Election, Politics

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