https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Will-To-beat-Trump-Dems-must-practice-a-13999203.php
"If the near future resembles the immediate past, which it often does, the Democratic nominee in 2020 will be, as the Republican nominee was in 2016, the person favored by the party faction for whom government is more a practical than an ideological concern. For Republicans in 2016, the faction — non-college whites — felt itself a casualty of an economic dynamism that has most benefited people who admire this faction least. In 2020, the decisive Democratic faction in the nomination contest is apt to be, as it was in 2016, African-Americans , whose appraisal of government is particularly practical: What will it do regarding health care, employment, schools? For them, packing the Supreme Court, impeaching the president, abolishing the Electoral College and other gesture-promises probably are distractions. African-Americans were at least 20 percent of the vote in 15 of the 2016 primaries, and in all the primaries combined they gave 76 percent of their votes to Hillary Clinton. This is why Trump did not get a chance to defeat Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who narrowly defeated Clinton among white voters in the primaries. These numbers are from the National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar, who referred to a 2016 Pew survey that found just 27 percent of African-American Democrats identify as liberal, and a plurality describe themselves as moderate. Some of that plurality surely resent the idea of reparations for slavery as a badge of an irremediable damage...
Everything, however, depends on Democrats jettisoning, before they allow it to influence their selection of a candidate, their self-flattering explanation of 2016. As William Voegeli, senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books, has written: “Ascribing the 2016 election to your opponents’ bigotry makes clear that the problem was not that Democrats didn’t do enough to deserve people’s votes, but that the people weren’t good enough to deserve Democrats’ governance. ... One imagines that, sooner rather than later, even Democrats will come to suspect that denigrating people until they vote for you lacks a certain strategic plausibility.”
"If the near future resembles the immediate past, which it often does, the Democratic nominee in 2020 will be, as the Republican nominee was in 2016, the person favored by the party faction for whom government is more a practical than an ideological concern. For Republicans in 2016, the faction — non-college whites — felt itself a casualty of an economic dynamism that has most benefited people who admire this faction least. In 2020, the decisive Democratic faction in the nomination contest is apt to be, as it was in 2016, African-Americans , whose appraisal of government is particularly practical: What will it do regarding health care, employment, schools? For them, packing the Supreme Court, impeaching the president, abolishing the Electoral College and other gesture-promises probably are distractions. African-Americans were at least 20 percent of the vote in 15 of the 2016 primaries, and in all the primaries combined they gave 76 percent of their votes to Hillary Clinton. This is why Trump did not get a chance to defeat Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who narrowly defeated Clinton among white voters in the primaries. These numbers are from the National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar, who referred to a 2016 Pew survey that found just 27 percent of African-American Democrats identify as liberal, and a plurality describe themselves as moderate. Some of that plurality surely resent the idea of reparations for slavery as a badge of an irremediable damage...
Everything, however, depends on Democrats jettisoning, before they allow it to influence their selection of a candidate, their self-flattering explanation of 2016. As William Voegeli, senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books, has written: “Ascribing the 2016 election to your opponents’ bigotry makes clear that the problem was not that Democrats didn’t do enough to deserve people’s votes, but that the people weren’t good enough to deserve Democrats’ governance. ... One imagines that, sooner rather than later, even Democrats will come to suspect that denigrating people until they vote for you lacks a certain strategic plausibility.”
