Trump – What I Learned Tomorrow

Wrong!

Well that’s embarrassing. Saw one guy from Ohio on a news show, saying that when pollsters came to his door or rang him up: “I lied.”

So nobody saw this coming. In a post this past Spring explaining the rise of Trump, i laid out the case of the disaffection, that general political malaise which Donald rode to a win, but i certainly didn’t think it would play to a majority in Pennsylvania or Michigan. The key to a Hillary win, in my eyes, was her +30 points among Hispanics, combined with a higher turnout among Hispanics, offsetting expected lower turnout among African-Americans, compared with 2012.

And that happened like i saw it. Hillary won Hispanics by +30, they did turn out higher, and it was enough to counter lower black votes. Only one talking head on tv Wednesday diagnosed the election correctly. Educated whites in the Rust Belt, Obama won by 16 points. This time, Hillary lost them by 10. The lone correct ‘splainer nailed the reason as a protest vote gone haywire. So many in MN, MI, WI, IA, OH and PA had been fed the line for months that their states were going to go to Hillary and she was obviously going to win, that they saw a vote for Trump not as wasted, but might be used as a protest vote, to let Hillary know that she was on thin ice, that she would have to be more attentive to Rust Belt whites when she got back to the White House.

Trump turned out all his voters, which includes the 2% of Americans who are in the nutjob conspiracy wing of the right, who are normally low-frequency voters because they’re sure the whole thing is rigged by the CFR or Rothschilds or someone, maybe the lizard aliens. And he got the diehard Republicans, who just hate anything Clintonish for evah. And he got more than expected of casual Republicans, who just love to get out on Election Day and mingle, and they’d vote Trump just because they are there. But those constituencies are not enough in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan or Wisconsin, Iowa or Minnesota. Because cities exist.

The difference in the Rust Belt was whites who had gone for Barack, who didn’t like Hillary, but thought she was going to win. In that case, voting for Trump might be a protest to serve notice to Clinton that she better keep on her toes. For that voter, extending the red line all the way across the ballot looked like a good idea. Since Hillary was going to win, so they thought, a Republican congress would be a good check on her ambitions. That’s why Donald had coat-tails in the Upper Midwest, but not in Nevada or New Hampshire.

What i did not expect was that trend, the Rusty Protest Voter, was not offset by females across the political spectrum. We heard about catgrabbing, we heard about “pig” and “nasty” and we saw him tell Howard Stern that he barged in on 15-year old beauty pageant contestants in the dressing room because as the owner of the pageant “I kinda get away with that.” I expected that tape about Trump trying to bed a married woman, “I was after her hard, I went after her like a bitch” would turn social-conservative women away. It did not.

What i got wrong, was my assumption that women had more self respect. But, as the cosmetics and publishing industries have shown, nobody ever goes broke by underestimating women’s self respect.

After 2016

It’s 3 days until voting starts, or rather, until lines start forming to vote in the US. Early voting, mail-in ballots, absentee votes et cetera have been pouring in for weeks, but the tally won’t be done until November 8th. Despite the media’s glee at a race where they are now using words like “tightening” and “horserace” and even “toss up,” the real political animals know that the race was over last Spring.

But the media needs it to look closer because they die without viewers, so they’re playing up any glimmer for Trump. The rest of us know that there is no glimmer, but Trump voters are the most gullible section of American society, thus they are the most susceptible to stay glued to their screens large and small. But, just in case you are among the gullible, the rest of us need you to know, beforehand, that it was never close. It was never a horserace. It was a mule wandering onto a track and a racehorse whizzed by it. The mule said “Hey, what?”

There’s no problem with that. America needs her gullibles. We need people to read celebrity igs, and to eat a sandwich with 2000 mg of salt just because something in it was once “organic”. We need people who think a cocktail is better when chilled to -273º, just like we need people to do hilarious things on webvids. It’s a social contract. They provide services, and in return they get middle-class money and a right to vote. The only problem is that the gullibles are now being told that a mule really could have beaten a thoroughbred. And, since they’re gullible, they can tend to believe it.

Plenty of non-gullible people have been squawking about how much damage Trump would do to the US and to the international community, if he won. The real problem, however, is that he has already damaged the world and nation. Luckily he won’t do any more damage past mid-November, but unluckily, the damage already done will take years to clean up. The real problem is what to do with a few million gullible people in 2017, the people who really believed that mules could run.

“As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.” –Arthur Carlson

One plan might be to shame them, to heckle Trump voters as “losers” and let your dog pee on lawn signs. Make sure that throughout November and December too, they can’t forget how gullible they were. But that would not work out like you think it would. Failure does not cure gullibility. Pestering former trumpites would only open a door in their souls, where an even nuttier idea can walk right in. Trump TV won’t need any help getting viewers.

Speaking of which, the most predictable thing about his new channel is that they will increase viewership by reporting stories about how current viewers are being persecuted. That’s an old, old story, and it always works on a portion of the population, no matter what century it is. Insert PT Barnum quote here, you know the one.

The other plan might be to shake hands with the trumpites you know, mumble something about Trump’s forthrightness, and say “She won’t be so bad, you’ll see. We’ve had worse, eh?” Accept the trumpites back into civil society, and we’ll lose fewer of them to the online wonderland of conspiracies. Shiny objects, and all that.

But there is a third option, for dealing with the losing side this time around. Deny everything. Deny anything happened. Don’t talk about the election at all, and when asked, just say “Oh, I’m glad that’s over, I was getting tired of the ads.” Act like it was no big deal, it happens every four years, w-ever. Tuesday? Oh yeah, but Wednesday is a favorite show. Or a recent liked restaurant has a twofer on Wednesdays. Any cover story you like, just deflect any suggestion that there was ever an election this year.

After a week of this, former trumpers will start to wonder what they were all worked up over. When everyone seems to be ok with whatever happened last week, and if volcanoes have not broken out all over the world on Wednesday November 9th, then maybe. Maybe they’ll insist that they’ll sit back and suffer for four years, but maybe they’ll have a wider view now. A step back and a fuller picture now: this is America and we do this every four years. We go a little nuts, so sue us. But afterwards we get back to work.

Every time a partisan’s candidate loses, they think it’s a cataclysm. Hound them and they’ll cabalize. Console them and they’ll think they were doing something good, and it went south only on a fluke. But if you pretend nothing ever happened, gullible people will start to believe that’s true too. No news here, move along folks. Look over there, a celebrity divorce!

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That’s what to do about the grumpers, but what about the shambles left of the Republican party? Reince Priebus is obviously out of the top chair, it’s a miracle if he hangs on until Christmas. That’s when the real fun starts. The various factions which make up the rightwards coalition now, will all vie for control. If they had compatible aims, there would emerge a consensus faction. Trouble is, there are divergent aims among the rightward factions, which each now blames the others for thwarting.

Who is the rightward today? You have the fiscal conservatives who basically want lower taxes, and see smaller government as logical to get that. Then you have the christian conservatives who would appreciate having the government establish Christian Sharia Law, minus the headgear of course. Then there’s a farther right pocket who wants radical curtailing of federalism to parallel the literal Constitution. And another pocket which wants social programs ended, because black people exist. And others, you know, browns too, most of them fersure.

Sheesh, i know it hurts to say it, but the US still suffers from crappy ideas like that. But here’s the thing, when the south flipped from Democratic to Republican in the late 1900’s, the racists flipped too. Cause/effect, chicken/egg? You call it. The result is that most of America’s real dooshes are more comfortable with Republicans.

Trump didn’t ‘splain ’nuff to gain America’s confidence, but he will peel off one or two of those constituencies to the Trump TV Party. Obviously, the racist wing will be the first of them. The remainder of the Republican party will publicy be glad of the riddance, but internally will be surprised at the number of defections. Who else will switch to the Trump TV Party?

We know it won’t be the social conservatives, because of faith and perseverance and the conviction of conversion. The hard Constitutional fringe is likely to gravitate trumpwards, if only to have a home at last for such a politically nebulous collection. Will it be the fiscals to join Trump? If so, the Republican party splits wide open. It becomes the Trump Party and the God Party, in a threeway slaughter against the Democratic Party.

This fact is not lost on fiscal conservatives, and yet, they can no longer hitch their wagons to the christian wing, because the science of demographics exists. 2016 is the year that the christian right bloc loses power. Either they swallow hyssop and join Trump, or they accept a meek role as Republicans, or they go it alone. In any case, they become a free bloc and whoever they align with will have to become a coalition. The devil’s bargain, religious support is great in local races but a hindrance on larger scales. Again, those pesky demographics.

While all of this is going on, Hillary’s transition team will be massaging the media with gushing positivity. To the general observer it will look like the Republican party is changing were-something on a full moon. In a tragically hilarious completion of a small cycle, the Republicans in the House who have atrophied their muscle of compromise over the last eight years, will be unable to name a Speaker in 2017. That is, until one side asks for the help of the Democrats.

And that’s the flare over the ocean, thence the business wing of the Republican party defects. Just like in 1993, they go blue. The difference between now and 1993, is that there is no backstop. There won’t be a recognizable Republican party to return to. No Plan B. Other difference is that in 1993, there was no Twitter. Instead of being big news, the defection of the business bloc from red to blue will be a peppering of little news.

The Rest Of The 2016 Presidential Race

By now, we can see what’s taking shape. In late April of 2016, we’re headed into what giddy pundits call “Super Tuesday” for a third time, this one on April 26th. Hardly super, but includes Pennsylvania so that’s nifty. Big deal. No further primary elections matter.

On the Red side, the whalloping Trump did in New York was catastrophic to Cruz, as predicted here last month. We still have Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey to come. Trump’s backyard and garage, Cruz is guaranteed to show 3rd in these. Maryland and Delaware are no friend to Cruz either, his “ownership” of the 2013 gov’t shutdown is recalled bitterly by the people of Maryland. Delaware… not many delegates, but the main biz of the state is right up Trump’s alley, so i expect a highly sympathetic electorate.

On the Blue side, mirroring closely, the whallop of the girl over the boy in New York has mathematically ended his chances. Again, as described here earlier, Bernieboy will not quit. He is not in it to win, never has been. He’s in it to go down in history, as the guy who made it possible to elect a socialist president in 2028.

From here on out, we should see the end of debates, and was surprised that there was a final one in Brooklyn last week. Neither frontrunner needs the bickering, since the nominations are locked. But many still don’t see that, so expect to see political money in May abandoning downballot races and flocking to the top in a desperate gambit to deny one or the other candidate a lock.

The idea of a 3rd-ballot moderate emerging at the Republican Convention in Cleveland is a fucking farce. Both major camps of delegates will be conservative extremists, 40% from the Tea Party and 40% from the evangy wing. Ohmygod, they’re going to need splatter shields, even before someone tries to deny Trump the nomination. With this balance of internecine animosity, unique in American politics this century, the Rules Committee will be paralyzed. Expect fantastic antics from the Platform Committee too, as it tries to stave off it’s own obsolescence.

The GOP convention will be hilarious. Scheduled from July 18th to the 21st, but wouldn’t be surprised if it ran to the 23rd. The “old hands” and half the “rising stars” will have power ripped from them, both behind the curtain and on the floor. And truly, as the Candidate Who Must Not Be Named once said, if they deny him the nomination, it’ll be a freakin’ riot. Whatever happens, Reince Priebus is doomed, and after seeing his evolving broadcast persona throughout April, i think he knows it too. The only meaningful thing Reince can do now, is to hire Hell’s Angels for convention security.

In a genius stroke of luck, the Democrats scheduled their convention for 1 week later, July 25-28 in Philadelphia. If it had been before the GOP swapmeet, the Dems would be in a real bind about who to nominate as Vice President, not knowing who the top of the Republican ticket was. If it’s Trump-Carson, then Clinton-Warren might be best. If it’s Kasich-Fiorina then maybe Clinton-Biden has a better chance. Whatever it is from the Republicans, the Democrats have an extra week to mull it over this year.

On towards the Autumn, expect four debates. If it’s Trump as expected, debating him 1-on-1 is much easier than on a 4-person stage. Trump is a mimic on stage, an empath. That’s what makes his stump speeches sound genuine. In a debate, if you treat him civil, you get a civil and reasonable Trump. Debate him hard, and you let out the hard Trump. He’s not particularly eloquent, but chatty and with good timing. The formula for beating him in a debate is easy: chalk it up, don’t talk it up.

Trot out facts and policies and leave them hanging. Whichever ones Donald picks up to contest, his counterpoint will fall flat with the political middle. After a few hours of such debate, it will be painfully obvious which candidate is prepared for the job and which one needs big hands to stroke a big ego. No kidding, halfway through the second debate, Americans will be a fuckofalot more comfortable with Hillary as president. Like magic, in early October, Merritt Garland is confirmed to the Supreme Court. Wow, is Mitch McConnell a dick or what.

The most meta-interesting thing this cycle is that Hispanics will finally become the political force they might have been. Trump’s rise has been on the backs of denigrated Hispanics, so you’ll see a spike in registration in that group. If it’s Clinton-Castro in the general election, the Dems get a 20-year honeymoon with the entire Hispanic-origin population, flipping New Mexico, Nevada, Texas and Colorado to the blue side.

The Rise Of Trump

The problem with political punditry is insularity. You can cliche that to read “beltway”, and perhaps rationalize your favorite pundit’s continuing integrity because his or her show broadcasts from somewhere outside Washington DC. Instead, there is a lockstep between the larger a pundit’s voice gets and their degree of access to sitting politicians and political professionals. A natural, symbiotic relationship. Flipside is that political pros begin to rely more on pundits for feedback as the relationships grow closer.

Take a second and digest that, because it’s the kernel of the rise of Donald Trump in 2016.

There are three kinds of US citizens. One part of the citizenry votes. One part of the citizenry could, but does not vote. And the third portion is people who can’t, or wouldn’t if they could. Some sociologist might quantify the divisions listed here in percentages or octiles, but i’m not smart enough to do that, and not dumb enough to try.

The problem with pundits is that the better they get, the more time they spend with people in the first group. If you surround yourself with habitual voters, then eventually, you start to think that people who don’t vote don’t matter. Not a right-wing or left-wing issue, simply a natural tendency of tweeters who are interested in the same thing to flock together, even if they disagree on that thing.

The failure of this organic gaggle to foresee Trump’s resiliency is thus very explainable and totally understandable. Predictable, even. Neither half of the pundit class “saw him coming”, because the more you think about politics, the more you think about politics. Ground games with turnout machines can mobilize occasional voters, but the more politically active a person is, the less they think about habitual non-voters.

Being no pundit nor donor, i’ve had innumerable chats with people who work hard every day. Once in a while someone will express a political viewpoint, and about 2 in 10 say they vote. But the one viewpoint most common is that same refrain: “Politicians are all the same, so I don’t bother.” This has been going on for 40 years, to my ears. Four decades of people disengaged from politics because both parties agree on only one thing: a stable 2-party system where they are guaranteed to be those two parties, forever.

Ask any polling company. They all have heard it a (literal) million times. People who could vote but don’t all say the same thing: Politicians are all the same so why bother? The amazing thing is not Trump’s rise, but that no pollster nor strategist nor pundit came up with a way to qualify and enroll this widespread political meme before 2015. Both political establishments have been swinging with their eyes closed for 40 years.

It was the None Of The Above movement of the 1970’s. It was the Perot candidacies in the 1990’s. And now it’s Trump. It keeps coming back, and one effect of the internet on political discourse is that it grows the size of the pundit class, but the increase is only among the people who were already in the world of habitual voters. They kept telling themselves that it couldn’t happen, that normal people would know better in the end. Trump must eventually fail, they thought, because all the people they know are smarter than that.

And that’s the point, there’s the kernel of Donald Trump’s rise. All the people who converse back and forth about politics and vote regularly, are on the same migratory path over the political landscape, just in different directions. The dry land they fly over sprouts green every 20 years it seems, an interval just long enough for politicos focused on the future, to forget the present.

Since wonks and bloggers didn’t take Trump seriously last Summer, neither did the GOP establishment. They’re the only ones who could have tackled him early on. It was a false sense of security, because everyone the pundits talk to are party people, and the party people only talk to pundits. And reporters, but only when they have to. Insularity is fatal in politics.

If anyone in either the Democratic party or Republican party tried to truly remake their wing into a populist organization over the last 40 years, they have been squelched, absorbed or squandered. The people who have watched this happen are the habitual “it doesn’t matter” non-voters. Perot voters were “it might matter” voters. They ended up with Bill Clinton. Reagan voters were “it matters” voters, but they ended up with his crazy-quilt cabinet of bickering hardliners.

Trump voters are “this is the last time it might ever matter” voters. The central idea is that both national parties have left this segment uncatered, by dragging down campaign finance reform, delaying ethics investigations, and refusing term limits. And now the bickering. For six years now, the bickering. The Trump voter sees the bickering and 6 years of constant crisis mode in Congress, and sees what he/she always saw, only now it’s come to the point of paralyzing the whole country.

Hahah, and now magically, as if it wasn’t the standard 20 years since Perot’s time, there appears a candidate who claims to know how to put everything back together again. Perot had substance but not much style. Trump comes at it from another way. But they both tapped into the same group of “it doesn’t matter” people, the could-but-don’t voters. Perot got 30% of the total vote. The difference between Perot and Trump is that Perot poached 30% fair and square, and Trump will start out with a dedicated 30% who just hate Hillary’ guts, no matter what color the sky is.

A person might define politics as not the study of actions, but the timing of reactions. A confluence of factors has paralyzed Congress, making Trump’s rise all but inevitable. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else. And if it was someone else, the parade of political punditry would have missed him or her as well.

March 15th 2016: The Day We Elected Hillary Clinton

And there you have it, the day American politics changed forever: March 15th, 2016. Obviously i’ve been saying this for some time now, but did not know the exact date it would fall on. The Ides of March indeed!

It can be seen in the speeches made by the four remaining Republican candidates on this day, combined with some easy delegate math, and a bit of not-too-hard scrying. First, the speeches on the evening of this “Mini Super” Tuesday:

Rubio: Still the fidgety characteristics which killed him in the debates. Not sure why people in the early stages of this election cycle called him a master debater, but he… oh, OK, now i get it. Ooops. But any way, the stakes seemed too high for him, his flan is half-baked. In style, he kept missing lines and stumbling over expected applause lines. In substance, it was a glowing Shining City speech, and he dangled his resume out there, since he’s not running to keep his Senate seat this year. Prediction: he replaces Reince Priebus, and his seat goes blue.

Kasich: Humble plus defiant equals respect. Genuine and heartfelt, a good speech from someone who doesn’t miss his lines very much. Keeps the persona going, as a manager who can get the best out of people, and winning at home might just drag out some funding in a post-Marco field. Plus, he ripped his jacket open like he was going all Superman on us. He’s the guy everyone wants to win, and this somewhat rambling speech could just start the money faucet running. Rambling is not bad if it’s homespun, only if it’s nutty.

Cruz: One thing Rubio and Kasich did, was to place teenaged daughters in the camera frame. Instead, Cruz chose his Texas campaign manager. Oh boy, that was a mistake. The looks on that guy’s face face flashed so quickly between different shades of worry, and mind you this is the campaign director in a state where Cruz already won the primary. Out of the gate, Cruz said “Tonight was a good night.” His hometown guy should not be bugging out that bad, if it was good night. Yikes, he just lost 4 of the country’s 12 biggest states, and three of them are 21st-century battlegrounds.

The outward appearance of the speech is summed up by one thing: Cruz had more collar than neck. He has a way of bobbing his head like a turtle when he speaks, and his collar was already starched too high for his actual neck to reach it even when he was not hunched over. Combined with Cruz’s flawlessly soul-less delivery, this made Ted look like a Munster, though not sure which one. Lurch or Eddie maybe, but there’s some Fester in the cadence of his speeches.

The gist of Cruz’s speech was “Hey, I’m what you got left.” Was sad to hear him try to make Nancy roll over by stealing her husband’s “morning in America” line, and even sadder that he mentioned his endorsement by Senator Lee of Utah. Mike Lee is the only one. Cruz works with 99 other Senators, and he’s the last Senator in the race, but the other 98 are so disgusted by Cruz that they won’t touch him. Today, even the far-far right wingnut Senator from Oklahoma, James Inhofe, endorsed Kasich. Yikes, Inhofe may be the only Senator further to the right of Cruz. If he’s going for the remaining moderate in the race, you know Ted’s co-workers despise him something terrible.

Trump: What else can it be but: terrific, really, terrific these people, and more great things, you know, greatest things, really ever, God bless you, Good night.

As things stand now, the primaries are over. Hillary has a 2-to-1 lead over Bernie with 49.9% of the races over, meaning that he’d have to beat her 67-to-33 in all the remaining Democratic primaries. Ain’t happening, so Hillary is our Blue candidate. But Bernie will go the distance. He’s having a ball, and sees his race now as a chance to give America its Socialism 101 lesson. The internet money keeps rolling in, so Sanders can keep jetting around the country, so he will.

It’s not about winning, it’s about the crusade for Bernie now. In his mind, he is now fulfilling his life’s pinnacle purpose: to re-introduce modern America to socialism, after 80 years in the doghouse. For the first time since the end of the Cold War it is now possible to separate socialism from communism in the minds of Americans, and Sanders wants to go down in history as the guy to do that. So he will.

On the Red side, about $200 million has been spent so far, and $180 million of that went down a rabbit hole (most recently the $20 million spent to deny Trump a win in Florida… where he won 66 of the 67 counties). With Rubio gone, the remaining non-Trumpers are STILL fracturing, some holding their noses and backing Cruz, and others plumping up Kasich’s bid for a brokered convention. Trump has a little over 50% of the delegates he needs to reign at the convention, with a little less than half of the primaries to go.

Trump is right on pace for 1237 delegates, as long as the opposition remains fractured, and it looks like it is. A couple meetings later this week, one in Florida and one in Washington DC, are planned to do an autopsy on that wasted $20 million and decide where the anti-Trumpers go from here. Rich donors are meeting in Florida and party “strategists” are meeting in the nation’s capital. The hilarious thing is that there are TWO meetings, virtually guaranteeing that the ensuing non-Trump efforts will be disconnected and, thus, both fail. Anything they decide (separately) will be too late for the round of primaries on Tuesday March 22nd, and judging by their ineffectiveness so far, will fail to tilt anything on the farther group of primaries on the following Saturday, March 26th.

It bears repeating that this is why i do not fear the rise of an oligarchy to power in the United States. Rhetoric from libertarians on the right and socialists on the left notwithstanding, the conspiracy theories almost never prove true. A basic fact of human nature ensures this: rich and powerful people are “type A” personalities, which makes them particularly unsuited to cooperate. This has turned the famous Citizens United decision by the highest court (allowing unlimited political donations) into a disaster for the Republicans. Various competing billionaires have carved up the right wing into political baronies by pouring unprecedented cash into GOP primaries. Predictable results.

Like i said, Trump is on a pace for the necessary 1237 delegates, since primaries in New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York are all coming up. He will flatten Cruz here… in Trump’s own house, his front yard, his back yard and garage. Rubio was the best competition in Virginia, where Cruz wilted… and the Maryland and Delaware primaries are coming up soon too. That’s six more Trump wins, and the only remaining elephant, California, is unlikely to be Cruz Country. This state elected The Arnold, it will nominate The Donald.

The only possible unknown at this point (March 16th 2016), is how much Kasich can be inflated by endorsements and big money donors between now and June 7th (the California primary). If the Ohio governor can surge in April and May, then it’s possible that Trump will not have 1237 by the convention (and neither will anyone else).

But i’ll tell you what: if Trump gets to the Cleveland convention with 1225 pledged delegates and doesn’t get the nomination, then it’s completely curtains for the Republican Party. Trump takes his marbles and goes home, endorses Hillary, and she’ll get a Reagan-esque landslide, maybe as many as 240 in the Electoral College. The newly politicized Trump army will stay home, just like they always have in the 3 decades before Trump. Not only that, but they’ll be bitter about it. They are Trump’s marbles, not the GOP’s, and if he takes them out of play, they’ll stay out of play.

In this scenario, the Senate flips Blue, as blue as in 2008. And the House might still be in Republican hands in 2017, maybe not, but at best with a 5-seat Republican edge. Even if the House stays red, they will not be able to govern, so fractured that only legislation by acclamation will be possible. And a lot more people will be bitter about that too. Finally, the point will get through to the political middle that Republicans are incapable of governing as long as they’re wedded to the twin political fringes of social recidivism and fiscal rigidity.

On the other hand, if Trump does get the GOP nod, the entire political middle goes Democrat, turnout among minorities skyrockets (new registrations among Hispanics doubles their segment), and we have the same results as above: Clinton landslide and a blue Senate, though Republicans are less likely to hold the House, a House they still can’t do anything with if they did. In either case, the Republican Party is left in a shambles (at best), or splits into two parties (more likely). It gets even worse for them in 2020, but that’s an essay for another day.