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Notes -
Well said.
The biggest draw for Trump wasn’t that he was a successful businessman or a social conservative. It was that he actually bothered to promise anything to 40% of the population. The rest of his positions and popularity coalesced around that image.
...this has got me thinking about what’s it would have taken for Trump to run as a Democrat. “Make America Great Again” is an equal-opportunity slogan, and he’d have demolished any of his primary opponents in a general. I suppose all the actors which pushed against Bernie might have found better leverage against Trump, though.
I think Trump has some policy preferences of his own, and they are likely a mix of "more-right" and "more-left" opinions. My guess is that there's a bit of a bias to the right, but not to a great degree--in fact, in terms of personal policy preferences, I suspect that Trump averages out to a right-leaning centrist in an American context, even though that probably sounds crazy to most people.
Also, Trump was always going to present himself as populist/anti-establishment. From that angle, his first hurdle would have been the establishment candidate of the respective parties. As much as many people love to hate Hillary Clinton, she was wildly popular compared to Jeb Bush.
The crazy thing is that it's not crazy. As was pointed out a number of times during the 2016 election Trump was effectively a 90-era moderate in terms of policy. The fact that this was now seen as "beyond the pale" was held up as of evidence of just how out of touch the media had become from the regular population.
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i can agree with the idea of trump being somewhat centrist in his own political leanings but only for social policies. His personal preferences for economic policy and especially taxation are way out of line with the leftist overton window. I can't imagine the guy standing for anything that would mess with his bottom line in any substantial way.
That said, i wouldn't mind if trump had run as a dem, he's good at riling people up and i think he is unprincipled (flexible? creative? choose how charitable this adjective should be) enough to say most stuff democrats would like to hear if that was the most realistic path to power for him. Like you say though, i think clinton vs trump in a dem primary is a way worse matchup than jeb, who trump basically ridiculed off stage.
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