Can Trump Beat Clinton?

First, experts said that Donald Trump would get nowhere. Then, that he wouldn’t break the 30 percent mark. Later, that Ted Cruz had managed to accumulate newfound popularity among Republicans, having previously insulted the Party, all because the common goal of stopping the stray bullet that is Trump prevailed over all else. Until Trump – much like this column has been predicting these last few weeks – became the only real candidate to consider. Come the national convention this summer, he will have accumulated enough delegates to run a chance of winning the nomination on the first ballot.

Now there’s talk of the sheer impossibility that Trump could overthrow Clinton or even be considered the ideal opponent to the Democrats – a party that any other Republican candidate would have easily defeated considering the disrepute surrounding the Clintons’ perceived role in the political-financial mess-up, having ignored warning signs from the public. But can we really be sure?

It’s true that, for several decades, elections have been much easier for the Democrats, who have control of 18 states including the capital, than the Republicans, who only have 13 definite states. It’s also true that Trump would have to take, hypothetically speaking, Colorado and Virginia, as well as Pennsylvania and Michigan, to match the U-turn fronted by Ronald Reagan back in 1980. Let’s not forget that George W. Bush only won by a very small margin.

To make things even harder, Trump is viewed negatively by 65 percent of the population, 9 percent more than his Democrat rival. If he wants to improve his chances of winning, he’ll have to considerably increase his voter base to secure not only the Hispanic and African-American vote, but also win over women in higher education – three groups who’d run a mile before turning to him.

Yet this analysis, though true, overlooks three important electoral factors: the reconstitution of the voter base, the Republican Party’s internal revolution, and voter apathy toward the Democratic party (excluding Sanders) – an issue which Clinton is trying to crack in time for the Democratic primaries.

The reconstitution of the voter base means that many independent protectionists and assistencialists have affiliated themselves with the Republican camp or have voted as such in the primaries for certain states without explicitly expressing their standing. White voters, generally males with poor academic backgrounds and increased reception to nationalist and isolationist discourse, have shown their alliance with Trump. Interestingly, in the Democrat camp, the demographics of Sanders’s considerable voter base are somewhat similar. For these people, their hatred of Clinton is perhaps more powerful than their reluctance to vote for a Republican candidate.

As for the Republican Party’s internal revolution, the triumph of a protectionist, interventionist, isolationist, and nationalist discourse represents the denial that first Goldwater, and then Reagan drummed into the Republican camp. It’s a reaction to the disruption provoked, in certain areas, by the onset of globalization; to the increase in world threats and the continual complications in which, due to foreign policy, America is very much involved; and, of course, to the 2008 financial crisis, which gave rise to discontent toward the political-financial elite.

Finally, there’s the issue of voter indifference toward the Democrats, Sanders being the exception. Compared to four years ago, voter participation in the primaries for certain states has decreased by almost 30 percent. Staying at home on Election Day is, in terms of U.S. politics, one of the most powerful weapons for social protest – an enemy that Clinton fears just as much as, or perhaps even more than, Trump himself.