U.S. politics is veering toward a potential transformation in which both major parties are competing to capture a single constituency — millions of Americans, from schoolteachers to steelworkers, who have fallen on hard times.
The big picture: The party that successfully wins over this constituency in 2020, crossing gender, race, ethnicity and age, could hold power for a generation.
What’s happening: In 2016, President Trump won on a political hunch — that a swath of the U.S. left behind by the forces of globalization was a winning base. Now his intuition has gained intellectual force, and major Republicans and Democrats are attempting to capitalize on the bipartisan anger that suffuses American politics.
- “Millions of people feel left behind by the rapid social, cultural and economic changes under way. It’s clear the old ways no longer work and the party that is able to offer a better way forward will lead a new coalition on the scale of the New Deal and the Reagan Revolution,” Sen. Marco Rubio tells Axios.
- “Both parties are trying to come up with a 21st century economic doctrine that widens the winner’s circle and finds ways to course-correct the obvious inequities and unaddressed externalities of our current system,” says Bruce Mehlman, a leading policy…
