The extremism of the current crop of Democratic presidential candidates has left the political center up for grabs, and President Donald Trump is poised to exploit that opening by advancing principles shared by Americans across the ideological spectrum.
The 2020 presidential race has a long way to go, but the way things are shaping up, it looks exceedingly likely that Trump will occupy the center of the political landscape. Democrats, who did all they could to veil their agenda behind a “moderate” messaging strategy throughout the Clinton and Obama eras, have now thrown centrism to the wind and openly embrace a radical socialist platform.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the Democrats’ ascendant thought-leader, gave one of the best indications yet of her party’s ideological transformation at the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas, in early March.
Ocasio-Cortez isn’t one of the candidates running for the 2020 Democratic nomination, but she’s setting the tone for all of them. Every one of the U.S. senators currently in the race felt compelled to endorse her “Green New Deal,” and several Democrat candidates have indicated that they support the “Medicare for All” proposal that she also has championed. It remains to be seen whether they will also join Ocasio-Cortez in condemning Franklin Roosevelt’s original New Deal as “racist.”
These bomb-throwing antics will make it hard for Democrats and liberal commentators to argue, as they have done since the 2016 campaign, that Trump is the extremist in the race, especially in light of the unifying message he presented in his most recent State of the Union address.
At a time of intense gridlock on Capitol Hill, orders such as these put ideology aside and deliver substantive progress on issues that matter to all Americans, without having to rely on a Congress that can’t even seem to agree on minor issues. The strategy builds on a slowly accumulating legacy of bipartisan moves such as 2018’s First Step Act, which instituted the common-sense prison reforms that successive Congresses and administrations from both parties had failed to enact for decades.
This isn’t what most commentators expected for the 2020 campaign—the president adopting a principled, business-like approach to our greatest challenges in America, with solutions that appeal to the American center-right while Democrats take orders from the far-left fringe of their party—but here we are.
For media pundits, this may create even greater problems than it does for Democratic presidential candidates. They may have to admit that Trump’s message was never as far from the American center as they’ve spent nearly four years trying to convince people it was.