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So assuming harris loses, how do you guys think the democratic party will realign for 2026 and 2028? (And don't give me terrible, bad faith answers like, "they won't." They demonstrably have been-- sliding in trump's populist direction since at least 2020).
My predictions are that they'll moderate on cultural issues but head in a strongly left-populist direction on economic issues.
So regarding culture war issues, they won't drop abortion as a platform plank, but if trump fails to restrict it nationally the furor over it will just naturally reduce. Regarding gay, transgender, and minority rights, they'll probably just head in a more libertarian direction... continuing to enforce the same consensus culturally, but switching to a stance of resisting rather than promoting government interventions regarding those groups. The big exception will be immigration... Trump is going to take some sort of action against immigrants, and regardless of how effective those actions are, for the sake of his own ego he'll have to claim that they were successful. And regardless of whether he is, since immigration is mostly a perception issue that will naturally reduce its salience for his base. But on the flip side, democrats will be free to blame anything and everything they want on anti-immigration policies. Police violence, economic stagnation, loss in global standing, etcetera. And they'll be in the enviable position of being able to promise rosy outcomes without having to worry about actual policy, as the republicans are now.
Regarding economic issues... If Trump passes tax cuts (highly likely) they will raise the deficit and interest rates. If he passes tariffs (likely, though probably not to the degree he promised) they will raise the CPI. If he passes immigration restrictions/successfully kicks out illegal immigrants (likely), the price of housing will temporarily stall (likely) or fall (unlikely)-- though the effect here is proportional to the economic damage elsewhere, and in particular the rise in the cost of services. The net effect of all this will be to the benefit of, ironically, well-educated urban professionals with the financial resources to buy (or to already have bought) a house in the near term, and to do their electronics shopping in foreign countries. But in turn, poor people-- and especially poor people in locations that already had cheap housing-- will see a reduction in their buying power, without a commensurate increase in their salaries. If trump cuts welfare too that will in particular activate them. So I forsee a muscular resurgence of Bernie-and-Yang type "free gibs" promises tied to calls to tax "the rich" in a more explicitly redistributive framework. That might not sound too different from what the democratic party currently does, but it is-- current democratic policies are more tailored towards rewarding specific interest groups ("forgivable low interest loans for black male business owners" type beat) and feature complex taxation schemes designed by think tanks to extract exactly enough taxes to pay for them (as assessed by said think tank.) But by 2028, I think we'll see more maximalist proposals that start with a target enemy and a round number and elide specific details about distribution. Think, "10% wealth tax on billionaries and everyone gets their fair share!" They'll learn not to promise X thousand dollars per month, or any nerdy-glasses-emoji policy wonkery bullshit... they'll just rely on people thinking, "wow, bilionaires are mega rich, so if we make them even a little less mega rich everyone can be just regular rich!"
Here's my good faith answer: They won't.
Demographically there is no future 'Republican' party. There are no measures in place to turn the tide of the browning of America. What you'll get is a third world political schema. The playbook runs the same direction everywhere: Brown identitarianism. The democrats can literally do nothing and everything will be golden.
The Republicans will change their tune and move towards 'respectable' and 'sensible' third world politics. A regimented and what they hope to be invisible caste system where specific institutions that separate the good from the bad are solidified and protected. The future 'democrats' exist to destroy this with more extreme class and ethnocentric propaganda.
There's no sense in presuming anything else. Demographically the country is being held together by a bunch of 40-80 year olds. White children are already a minority. On top of that the history of American conservatism is one of nothing but losses. There is not a single thing on earth they have managed to conserve. The only thing democrats need to do is keep on keeping on. Which is what happens regardless of who wins the elections as seemingly every single politician loves nothing but an endless stream of brown immigrants.
I disagree.
The GOP has a clear path forward, Trump has seemingly reinstantiated the Reaganist "coalition of doers", the coalition of people who add value to the economy rather than extracting it. That is a brand with a future.
In contrast it seems to me that it's actually the Democrats who are looking down the barrel of demographic collapse. As they increasingly become the party of queer xes/xirs and wine-drunk cat-moms they become increasingly dependent on "imported" votes and lumpenproles and that is why they have (quite reasonably tbh) been treating Trump's anti-immigration stance as an existential threat.
The "browning of America" is a non issue next to the "Asiaing" or "South Americaing" of America.
Much more so on X than in reality. Apart from Texas, the places that pay net federal taxes are all solidly blue, and the people who actually build Musk's rockets appear to be (based on published stats about who corporate employees donate to) supermajority Democrats. The biggest Republican success story (De Santis' Florida) has an economy that is dependent on attracting retirees who come with large fiscal transfers attached. Remember that Trump's stated economic policy (which his normie supporters are strongly in favour of) is to repeal the CHIPS act, impose 10-20% tariffs on any ASML EUV machines that Intel (or TSMC US) tries to install in their next fab, and focus industrial policy on trying to bring toaster factories back to the Rustbelt.
The problem for a coalition of doers on the right is that most of the doers sit in the libertarian quadrant of the political compass, whereas the easiest place to take votes off the Democrats is in the populist quadrant. In the UK, housing policy is sufficiently centralised that this problem blows up the Conservative Party about once every six months.
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