THE TRAIN TO THE PRESIDENCY

In the days before the 2016 election, some big political bombs dropped on the Hillary Clinton campaign – Russians, Wikileaks, and Comey. But still most people and almost all pundits believed that her victory was inevitable. And why on earth was the Trump campaign wasting their time and resources on reliably blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin?

What a bunch of amateurs! Those states were so in the Democratic bag that even Hillary wasn’t bothering with them.

However, there were a few pundits, most notably filmmaker, Michael Moore and former Pennsylvania governor, Ed Rendell, who warned us that we should in fact worry about those battle fields where the Red Army was showing up and the Blue Army was not.

They warned us that Hillary had not been listening to angry blue-collar voters, who were losing the jobs, the security, and most of all the respect that had made the party of FDR their political home for generations.

The 2016 election came down to 77,744 votes in three states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

When the dust settled, Trump won Pennsylvania by 0.7 percentage points (44,292 votes), Wisconsin by 0.7 points (22,748 votes), and Michigan by 0.2 points (10,704 votes).

If Clinton had won all three states, she would have won the Electoral College 278 to 260.

She would have won those states if black voters had showed up in Obama numbers.

She would have won those states if so many white suburban women had not stayed home on election day or had not cast protest votes.

She would have won those states if white blue-collar voters who had voted for Obama had not felt so abandoned by the political establishment that they saw nothing to lose by voting for a wrecking ball.

In March of 2016, a tone-deaf Hillary Clinton, answered a question about her energy policy by saying, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Perhaps that was not the best way to win the support of those who had become losers in the new economy.

News reporters sat down and spoke with unemployed coal miners and their families, who were running low on money, hope, and dignity. Hillary tried but failed to undo the damage.

All Donald Trump needed to do was to declare himself their champion, promising to stop the “war on coal,” and bring back those jobs – as only he could. At every such opportunity, Donald Trump had an empty promise ready to go.

Michael Moore said this:

Whether Trump means it or not is kind of irrelevant, because he’s saying the things to people who are hurting. And it’s why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the human Molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.

By the time 2018 election campaigns came along, most 2016 wrong-way voters and stay-at-home voters realized that they had made a colossal mistake. On the campaign trail, Trump tried to sell caravan craziness, while Democrats pushed health care sanity. Republicans countered by trying to tell us that by dismantling Obamacare, they would make health care better than ever.

In congressional districts across the nation, the right Democratic candidates stepped forward – candidates, ranging from radically progressive to traditionally moderate, and right for their districts, and in essence said:

Do not listen to the Republican noise. They are desperate, out of ideas, and are owned by a narcissistic demagogue. They are peddling fear of immigrants and they are counting on you to buy it. But I know this district. I know the factories that are still closing, the middle-class jobs that are not coming back, the medical bills that are no longer covered.

And, the map flipped Blue in record numbers.

Now, the race for 2020 is underway, and it is possible that we will have as many as twenty-five or twenty-six contenders by the start of the debate season at the end of June. Many of you are worried that having too many contenders will result in handing the nomination to a candidate who will lose to Trump. I do not agree. I am happy to see so many quality job applicants, and I will be excited to see how each one of them performs on the debate stage.

At this point, I would not hazard a guess as to who the nominee will be, nor do I think there is a best fit for the times, based on race or gender. But I do think that the eventual winner will be the man or woman who genuinely understands the significance of this iconic story:

When FDR’s funeral train made its way along its route, greeted by large somber crowds, a man who was noticeably sobbing was asked:

Did you know the president?                                                                             

The sobbing man replied:

No, I didn’t know him, but he knew me.

        

I predict that after our ordeal of surviving Trump, the next President of the United States will be someone who knows that the coal miner is us.