1980s Democratic Revolution

[Yes]

Thanks.

How about the 2008 Recession? Will it still happen?

Eventually. If you build a house of cards big enough, at some point a wind will catch it. And that's what was done in roughly the years 1998-2008, by which starting time companies like Enron were getting going (how to make pretend money on speculation and use market-cornering tactics to wring profits out of jacked-up rates across entire regions.) Mortgage lenders were beginning to wonder just how much money could they make off this housing boom. And the repeal of Glass-Steagal that Republicans had salivated for since the Nixon years finally had both a solidly Republican House and not just a biddable Senate but a politically endangered President who could (a) get a lot of Wall Street lobbyists to contribute to his own campaign funds and his party's and (b) get a Congress that had tried to impeach him off his back a little, which could finally make it happen. There were so many players: this is not just an AH.com "let's change this factor and see how many things we can throw out of whack" deal. There were a lot of people with a lot of current or potential money who would do a lot to make this exact climate of high-risk speculative investment, adrenaline-rush, wealth-addiction, corner-cutting, moral-hazardous, financial-instruments focused economy of making a big fucking killing and devil take the hindmost, happen. This is not "butterflies" like we toss around the term here. It was forty thousand Monarchs hovering over a meadow in California, beating their wings in unison to make a mighty wind like the breath of God, sort of a thing. Like I say too much, there are butterflies but there are also trends. This was a TREND.

In the 1980s Democratic Revolution TL, Glass-Steagal repeal and mass deregulation of financial instruments and some sort of omnibus tax-cut system for investment and capital gains will be early legislative work for the pendulum-swing moment, when a Republican president finally comes back in with probably a Republican Congress along with him (something more like the shift in the UK when Blair's "New Labour" swamped the Tories after their eighteen years in power, rather than the back-and-forth of the Nineties and Aughts before 2008 and 2010 gave us two years of legislation and six years of civil-war gridlock.) You can start the clock then, and probably there will be some tendencies and habits of business practice that took hold even before that, and are now off the leash. From there you can give it about ten to twelve years before something big exposes the fact that a whole lot of your "economic growth and prosperity" is basically fraudulent transactions based on, and making more, artificial money that will disappear in a puff of margin calls leaving people holding the debt. That is the limiting case on the pendulum-swing Republican era after the 1980s Democratic Revolution era carries on (if they're lucky in the timing of the economic recovery around '92) through to the Nineties.

And really, the Democrats had better hope it is. Things could've gone differently in Ohio in 2004 IOTL. That would have created a Trump situation (or a Ford Wins in 76 situation like the one that launches this whole 1980s Democratic Revolution because it (1) damns the GOP for the pain of the Seventies and (2) gets a Democrat who is not Jimmy "coherent economic policy? What's that?" Carter into office.) You'd have John Kerry winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote by nearly two percent, which is a bad place to start in the very heyday of the Great Right-Wing Media Machine when every Hallmark store book stall was covered in titles by Ann Coulter and a boyish Glenn Beck. It's also less likely that the Democrats retake Congress even if they make some countercyclical gains. (It was New Orleans, Iraq, and the threats to privatize Social Security that brought the '06 Democratic wave -- that and a DNC Chair with the wit to actually fight for every Congressional seat. It's not rocket science, guys. Looking at you, Tony Perez. Remember this next year.) So if the market falls down and goes boom in '08, whether he reacts better to it or not (and, to be fair, Paul O'Neill who I will respect until the day I die fought against every orthodox-conservative economic instinct in his body and saved the global banking system even IOTL, with Dumbya in the West Wing), whether he has been trying to prevent it against a Republican Congress shouting "gimme! gimme! gimme!" or not, will be blamed when it happens. You want to be absolutely sure that the people who caused the problem are holding the bag. This was the case in 1932. It was again in 2008. We as a country might have been luckier if more taint of corruption had struck sooner with Grant, bringing in B. Gratz Brown (Greeley got so close...) and ending Reconstruction four years earlier, or if Johnson had run and won in '68 disrupting it from the start, so there was a chance of a liberal Republican nominee in '72 or '76 to try and put things right, rather than a Stalwart ready to trade black Americans' freedoms for a four-year gig. It's important that people get to own what they've caused.

That is the "catastrophic success" of the Democrats in '76. The Democrats had been seeking a preacher, a prophet, a maker-right-of-the-nation's-soul since at least '68. They went for it with Bobby where people tore at each other to touch the hem of his garments, the left went for it in force with McGovern in '72 caucusing their way to victory but without a plurality of the party popular vote, and for the first two thirds of the primary season and again for a period around the convention in the summer, they went for it whole hog with Jimmy Carter's big smile, his meritocratic story, and his seeming ethical purity. He nearly blew it and in grand historical terms it would have been better if he had despite the good things he did do at various points in his presidency and the talented people he brought into service around him. He had absolutely no feel for the substance of economic policy or the human consequences of economic policy. And that was precisely what was needed to put right the pains of the Seventies, not just someone who would never lie to you because Watergate. The Republicans needed to be left holding the bag for their decade worth (as it bled over into Carter's presidency) of economic mismanagement (the Nixon Shock, all Burns' loose money, the half-assed price controls, the half-assed mix of Friedmanite free-marketeering and budget orthodoxy, the lack of a coherent policy on energy or on restructuring the steel industry, etc.) and bad foreign policy choices (dragging out Vietnam, suborning and supporting crypto-fascism throughout the Americas, radically escalating our support for the Shah while his "White Revolution" crumbled under him, having no coherent vision for Africa besides stopping the Cubans and failing at that, making it good Cold War etiquette to tolerate the genocidal Khmer Rouge because they were China's clients, etc.) Carter dropped too quickly into the gear of managing chaos -- some of it was nature at work, he was one of nature's engineers much more than a lateral strategic thinker, concerned with soul but not enough with well-being -- and so brought down the consequences that were waiting to happen onto him and his party. He wasn't helped, of course, by a Congressional establishment that had been in place too long, that harbored too many would-be presidents (all of whom proved pretty bad at the campaign trail, to make a point in Carter's favor), and too many men with seniority who thought Carter was just a hayseed governor who got lucky in the primaries.

But if it goes the other way, if Ford not only wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote (as he was all but destined to do if he did win) and then has to own four years of roosting chickens, you can have a "1980s Democratic Revolution." You can have one after the Republican pendulum-swing blows it all on Ponzi schemes, too, if you keep your eye on the damn ball and educate your voters that they must show up for midterms too. Turnout in 2010 and 2014 was appalling at the national level (here in vote-by-mail Oregon was in the mid-to-high sixties and guess which state was countercyclical for the Dems both times? Again not rocket science.) And when that's so the "27% crazification factor" (it's a thing that holds up across a range of opinion polling systems and question sets, that around 24-28% -- the 27% figure was one particularly important poll and it stuck -- of Americans surveyed have some fricking crazy authoritarian absolutist views) show up to vote and carry all before them. You can have eras that way, like the "1980s Democratic Revolution" one of the OP here which is likely an Eighties and Nineties Revolution. Just remember, as the Democrats of 1977 forgot when Watergate and stagflation gave them all three branches of government to play with, that eventually the other side gets an era too.

 

[Yes]

Just for a bit of fun (because maps! I am powerless over US election maps, I admit it, it's a mighty thing; "Hi, I'm @Yes, and I'm a Leipaholic", "Hi, @Yes...") here are three scenarios for the breakthrough moment of 1980 for delectation.

The first one is the marquee matchup, Dream Team vs. Dream Team. On the Democratic side it's a Hugh Carey/Reubin Askew ticket, a compelling match of powerful and charismatic governors ("The Man Who Saved New York" and "Reubin the Good" who cleaned up Florida and shepherded its Sun Belt boom), balanced abilities to bring the elements of the New Deal coalition back on side (Carey with "Catholic ethnics" and also, soft-pedaled, with liberals because of his personal friendship with Ted Kennedy; Askew with poor whites and aspiring suburbanites across the South and in "culturally Southern" places like the Ozarks in Missouri, and southern Illinois and Ohio), strong economic records and ideological commitment to the economic security of ordinary Americans, and moderate-to-Cold War liberal views on foreign policy (though cautious; Carey was an early Vietnam opponent as a congressman.) On the other side Ronald Reagan and John Connally, the two most charismatic men on the GOP side, both straight out of central casting for "what a President should look like," Reagan leading the massed banners of the New Right and Connally to charm right-leaning independents and conservative Southern Democrats. Conditions here are that the economy has headed into the toilet steadily through 1980 and now unemployment's starting to rise too, but Ford has not screwed up too badly anywhere overseas.

Carey/Askew 320
Reagan/Connally 218

The Republicans did well all things considered. Other than New Mexico (where, interestingly that Carey=Catholics Askew=poor economically populist whites thing works) they owned most of the West and nearly took the consistent battleground state of Washington (Scoop can smell the Pentagon air from here -- he's been promised the job -- and Dixy Lee Ray's performance managing the Mt. St. Helens eruption help the Democratic ticket narrowly over the top.) They split the South with the Democrats, by an eyelash in Louisiana (where the Carey/Askew combo is strong, but the specific presence of both Reagan and Connally on the ticket is just enough to win by a few thousand votes) and pretty close in Tennessee too, but otherwise split it. They get killed in the Northeast/New England (even losing Vermont by a hair to émigré New Yorkers, unemployed Burlington workers, and liberal Republicans in revolt against New Right Reagan and Texan Connally), the Midwest (where Carey's strength with Catholics, Democratic strength in the cities small and large through the unions, and Askew's ability to bring in more voters in the rural south of Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri), and really the whole Mississippi River valley less the state of Mississippi itself. The national vote's not awful for the GOP either, probably on the lines of 51-48 with Ford seeming ok overseas and Rollins/Nofziger running merciless attack ads to sway undecided. But this is sort of peak performance for them against the best Democratic combo. Reagan's right-wing primary language, mobilization against twelve years of Republican baggage, and the Carey/Askew combo taking the New Deal coalition for one last ride is too much, especially when paired with a left sobered by McCarthy's role in giving the '76 election to Ford, and so ready to stay loyal to the anti-Reagan ticket.


Scenario 2 here is the same Democratic ticket, Carey/Askew, against a Bob Dole ticket that has survived, Ford-like, the challenge from the right by Reagan. Knowing he's dented already, carrying the bag for the Ford years, faced with a tanking economy, and relying on whatever rallying around Ford is happening viz. foreign policy, Dole goes for a fresh face and picks Sen. Thad Cochran (Cochran had a number of local dynamics going for him even if we shift '78 to an anti-Ford midterm), first Republican senator from the Deep South since forever, as a younger presence and an olive branch to the Southern Republicans deeply disappointed by Reagan coming up short again.

Carey/Askew 389
Dole/Cochran 149

Ouch. National "swing" is definitely the Democrats' way, although Dole is able to hold Vermont barely (woo hoo) and Michigan is much closer because Ford comes home and Bill Milliken gets heavily involved and they fight like hell for "Ford's man" at the local level. But the swing snags more votes and, most notably, after a long night of counting late-deciders jumping on the bandwagon and disillusioned Reaganauts staying home delivers California, just barely, to a Democratic ticket that had already secured the victory. This is probably peak Democratic performance -- a really well-balanced ticket against a wounded Republican one tied entirely to Ford and so permanently on defense.

So the last one, Option 3, is one where Fritz Mondale rather than Carey busts through past Muskie et al in the early going. Once he does he's a little more able than Carey to win remaining union support away from Muskie (I do think Muskie would hold on to more institutional, not necessarily rank-and-file, union support if the race outside the South was mostly a Carey-Muskie one), and really establish himself outside the South, and inside it he finishes second reasonably often boosted by his '76 partner Carter and Carter's regional contacts. But Askew still does really well in the South and Mondale picks a running mate who he knows will get maximum support from Askew: Reubin's old Floridian friend Senator Lawton Chiles. Chiles is a stolidly moderate Senate voter but an energetic and charming campaigner and keeps the Southern ties up. Against that, let's pit Reagan who decides to counter, after thinking hard on Charles Percy of Illinois, with Howard Baker the quintessentially moderate Southerner. Let's roll the dice:

Mondale/Chiles 295
Reagan/Baker 243

Not at all dissimilar to the first scenario's map, except that Mondale, while he has strong party backing and is a determined public speaking, makes a less charismatic opponent for Reagan and scrambles to keep up with Reagan's gifted campaign team: it takes a full-court press to keep Arkansas against Reagan's charm backed by Baker, and Mondale's Electoral College victory is dented by a dedicated Republican push that takes Ohio by a scant few thousand votes. But he has a clear popular vote victory and a small but definite Electoral College win that would've been even better if his team had kept their eye on the ball in Ohio in the last ten days of the race. (He actually does a little better than Carey/Askew in Washington state with a more focused and managed effort to mobilize union votes for the ticket and reciprocity for his efforts in the state -- Mondale had his flaws but he was a good ward-level campaigner.)

So that's an overall picture of where I think the strength and the votes would be for voting in the "1980s Democratic Revoution." Decent in the Northwest and of course there's the Hawaii outlier but otherwise almost entirely east of the Missouri River, with concentration on the Northeast/New England, the Midwest, and the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. In these scenarios a Floridian running mate adds Florida and (at this point, with the Floridian, Carter, and a still-strong state party backing the nominee in return for favors) Georgia. That's the picture. So during the "proper" 1980s Democratic Revolution, other than variable outlier strength in the Northwest and sometimes New Mexico, it's particularly an East/West divide with the South a battleground region that will continue to trend Republican over time but not as much when there's a Southerner on the ticket. Over time the "Atari Democrats" will improve performance on the West Coast and in the Rockies, while the South may drift more sharply Republican unless there's some specific care and feeding of its Dems, and Missouri and Ohio will be particular battlegrounds elsewhere, with coal country in KY, WV, and the "Pennsyltucky" parts of PA joining them. This is where intra-party battles involving unions and free trade agreements will come into play, since this TL is likely to keep the unions stronger for longer and even a smart "Atari Democrat" will need to keep peace with them until just about the middle of the Nineties when they can try to use the likely long boom of that period as a rising tide to slip in some more free-trade agreements. The Republican comeback is going to be about keeping as much of the non-West Coast West as possible, unifying the South as much as possible, and picking off targets in the Rust Belt: not unlike OTL at all. California will remain a battleground throughout the Eighties but it's going to take a major change in GOP personnel to keep them competitive there and that would be out of keeping both with the national party and with the people they've groomed at the local level since the Sixties; they will push harder and harder on immigration and the like and it's a demographic time bomb that will doom them, that and the "Atari Dems" wooing socially liberal entrepreneurs over to the other side.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

@Yes If the Conservative Movement comes to power in the 1990's instead of the 1980's, that means that the New Right will not have their revolution in the context of the Cold War, which was kind of their core raison del arte to begin with; without an existential threat to the United States beyond her shores, the Anti-Communist glue that bound Fusionist Conservatism together will weaken, and without Saint Ronnie's example, that means the Right will be forced to evolve.

Mind you, this evolution does not mean the Right's hold on the Republican Party becomes less extreme; after all, our current President is what happened OTL when this evolution finally came about.

 

[Yes]

@JFP,

One issue there (and you raise a very good point; also no fooling twenty points to Ravenclaw for raison del arte, I like it ) is it's an "all other things being equal" assessment. We don't know how the world beyond US borders will take shape in the 1980s Democratic Revolution TL. There will, for example, be countervailing impulses in the Democratic establishment with regard to the Soviet reform era that was coming (and yes, likely under either Gorbachev or Ryzhkov, Chernenko was too weak-skilled politically to get Romanov in the right place at the right time and even Romanov might have been forced into some of it once he saw the real figures.) On the one hand they will be very keen, once Scoop Jackson's heart literally gives out, to develop and sign as many arms control and reduction treaties as possible. On the other hand they're going to tiptoe more around the edges of the reform/teeter/collapse cycle because they don't want to be accused of going soft on the Commies who could make a comeback any second now. With less bromance with the leading reformist (a la Ron and Gorby) and less street cred for being the party of anti-Communism (as Bush took with him into the collapse phase), a fatally weakened USSR might last a bit longer, or move more quickly into the hands of revanchist "reformers" of the Putin/Zyuganov mold, keen to get the emergent oligarchs/mobsters whipped into line, to streamline the military to intimidate the "near abroad", and hang on to the strategic nukes that are their last trump card in the great-power game. They could in other words spend less time being the new Weimar as IOTL's Yeltsin era and get back to that old Russian alternative to radical revolution -- being run by reformist, revanchist chekists like, well, now.

So that's one part. The other is whatever emerges from the continually accelerating collapse of the Sykes-Picot Middle East. That could come on faster ITTL, either because the Soviet reformers decide they can do business with the Democratic administrations and put less in to propping up Middle Eastern clients instead concentrating on reform at home, or because more reflexive support for Israel from Democratic administrations stirs the pot more than IOTL where you had the very Saudi-focused Poppy Bush close to the center of power for twelve years, or it's an earlier version of the purported idea that the US will back the structural collapse of Sykes-Picot states in the region because if they're fighting amongst themselves it reduces the threat to Israel. Whether that is new nationalisms which Balkanize more rapidly -- maybe Iran-v-Iraq fatally weakens either Saddam's regime or the grip of the Velyat-i-Faqih in Tehran and there's a collapse at the center that triggers regional and tribalist separatism (Iraq could easily be an alternate Yugoslavia in the Nineties, or you could have both Iraq and Yugoslavia going down the same road at the same time.) Peace in Lebanon, or a more-not-less successful Israeli-Palestinian process could exacerbate rather than cool stressors within Syria because there are less external issues to unify around, or Lebanon's situation could eventually "infect" Syria producing an entire swath of ethnic and sectarian killing from Iraq's western desert to the beaches at Sidon. Afghanistan is still Afghanistan, and it's a wonder Libya lasted as long as it did and that Pakistan -- God, Pakistan with nukes in tow -- still coheres. I expect that whole "arc of crisis" from the Soviet near-abroad through Central Asia and the Middle East will produce something, or somethings, that will fill the anticommunist void just as "radical Islamic terrorism" is the "communist conspiracy" shibboleth of our contemporary Right. (Tbf both of them have a basic point, people like Stalin and the younger version of Andropov, or al-Zawahiri and the ISIS clique are bad, bad, bad humans. But the manichaeanism isn't necessary -- except that it is with an in-group culture of authoritarianism and primate-pod-under-threat mentality on the hard right.)

Also I wouldn't underestimate their ability to retool and recycle the other language of the modern Right, since Taft lost to Eisenhower if not before: how liberalism corrodes Real American Values and undermines capitalist prosperity (read most primally as the chance to get yours and laugh at those that didn't.) That, not the Soviets, was the real meat of "The Speech" that Reagan gave over and over for right-wing fundraisers in California and propelled him into elected office. And the Right that we live with now is as much the creation of the actors around and including Newt Gingrich as it is the creation of Bill Buckley, Goldwater, Viguerie, or Reagan. Gingrich's congressional Viet Cong didn't have the distinct and hero-making advantage of staring down the Soviets while they made it happen. But they banded together, organized, radicalized, and took to heart a few sobering lessons about the dynamics of American politics: the party in power is usually slow to adjust to change (hence catching the Dems napping in '94 and again in 2010), the bulk of the electorate and Democrats especially are terribly lazy about voting in midterms (so aim to radicalize and mobilize your core voters in the off-year cycles especially since many state-level races are set then, which lets you control state governments where you can experiment with how much you can get away with, and re-gerrymander the House of Representatives in your favor after the census cycle), the more right-leaning parts of the electorate tend to have few information sources and you can quickly dominate them all (Ailes had already gotten there with his memo to Nixon about funding a propaganda TV network in '72 and then he went and did it years later) and taking a hard line is always to your advantage until it isn't (and just like everything else in a political culture that's also linked to a range of high-risk speculative economic activities that depend on gulling the rubes, the goal is to get yours and get out before it falls down.)

By the Nineties, as there's a transition away from the 1980s Democratic Revolution leaders who date to classic postwar liberalism, you can mobilize poorer white folks across the country (but especially in what the right themselves -- ever breeding insecurity to use it as a weapon -- dubbed "flyover country") on culture-war issues because things are changing, not necessarily in their neck of the woods but at the national level. And while there's a great generalized economic boom on much as IOTL, the new generation of Democratic leaders are less inclined to distribute it towards those unionized workers and small farmers and their ilk. It's a loss of status, and that's hugely important in American society. First because in the US -- in theory and for good chunks of both the 19th and 20th centuries in practice -- status is fungible, which is both the bright promise and the stark terror baked into being American. The other is, to take the Annaliste view, a good chunk of those blue-collar folk (particularly the Anglo-Celtic and Germanic ones of them) descend very directly from the cultures of the old barbarian rovers, from Northern European thug life of the pre-Medieval period, where status (honor, glory, loot) was everything and it was fragile, so anything that endangered it was a mortal threat. These are Vikings with muskets, also only a few generations removed (not even that in Salem in the 1660s) from the great witch-hunts and pogroms of the Reformation era. They come from cultures where back in the day getting yours and honor killing were normal facets of life on the edge. (There are wonderful letters home from the Swiss colonists who inexplicably settled a chunk of eastern North Carolina in the 1700s about their Scots neighbors who were always it seemed killing each other in knife fights. Why, the tidy and industrious Swiss wondered, did they live that way? Because they came from a culture driven by war, poverty, and the threat of both, in which one's group-approved dignity was all one really had so any threat to it was life-or-death.) The Gingriches of the GOP insurgency (and they were, very much, a Leninist elite of a political insurgency, fighting a forty-year Democratic domination of the House of Representatives) knew exactly how to push those cultural and emotional buttons. It's how you could have the cognitive dissonance of so much support for a Rockefeller-Republican New Democrat Bill Clinton -- the architect it seemed of such amazing prosperity despite all his faults -- at the same time you elected an ever-more radicalized House of Representatives, and started (Trent Lott was the entryist ) shunting them into the Senate as well. People were fat and happy and either too lazy to vote in numbers or being radicalized by new media (the golden age of Rush in the morning and the tender youth of Fox News), accepting of a New Democratic consensus from the White House and scared and hurt that blue-collar Americans were losing their fragile privileges, enjoying record prosperity and concerned it would either leave them personally behind or that they weren't getting as much as they could if the whole thing was just totally unleashed (like it was 1998-2008.) Very human. And something that rhymes with that history is likely to go on once the real energy of the 1980s Democratic Revolution mellows into the Nineties.

And even if it's not Gingrich at the wheel, it's one of the achievements of AH.com to remind us that nearly all "great men" (perhaps better put as "decisive figures") can in some if not all measure be replaced by someone else, or a combination of someone elses. Within the modern Republican party, whether it's being a choice not an echo in the Sixties, or implementing a revolution against a hesitant Congress in the Eighties, or a band of rebels overthrowing forty years of incumbency in the Nineties, or standing up for Real Americans against a socialist Kenyan in the Aughts and Teens, it is always an evolutionary advantage to crazify, and to band together against an Other. The latter is important because just as you say, the actual elements of the Right's coalition are diverse and often opposed on some important specifics, and whenever they end up with real power in their hands they tend to fragment either over those differences or because what they've promised is just so out there they can't fully deliver, else they wake the other side up and provoke a counterattack. But particularly when they are in opposition -- and even St. Ron, after the disastrous budget of FY 81-82, mostly faced an opposition House and a Senate where, despite a Republican majority for six years, there were still just enough moderate-to-liberal Republicans left that if you went hard right with things like Bork or the contras or such, they could stop you -- that evolutionary advantage for clear-eyed radicals with a hardened, reliable base maintains.

Thanks for prompting a reply -- you make a particularly good point about that earlier generation of the New Right, especially the "purist" Goldwaterites, for whom the Cold War plus Hayek-style libertarianism were the driving forces. This is a different world for them to live in and after, I suspect, giving a good account of themselves in the Democratic Revolution Eighties, they will feel just as much strangers (for a different set of TL specific reasons) as a dying Barry Goldwater did when he watched a New New Right warm-up speaker for Bob Dole's '96 campaign and turned to Dole to say, "My God, Bob -- we're the liberals now..."

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

<snip>

Fair, well reasoned points. Even if we say that foreign affairs in 1992 are tough to predict TTL, I do think it's not unreasonable to think that being largely analogous by 1992 to otl is at least plausible. Lets' say another democrat wins 1988, and by 1992 FP is a tiny, insignificant part of the political debate; what do the GOP focus on as a result, and how does that carry on into the 1990's?

As you say, the Goldwaterite faction of the GOP will keep falling in power in relation to the growing power of the Religious Right; I expect that by TTL's 1992, even Ronald Reagan will be considered too socially liberal for the Conservative base, who are now less concerned with talk of cutting taxes, red tape, and government programs, and more energized with "preserving family values", "law and order", and "restoring the heartland". They'll also be very receptive to candidates who talk of withdrawing from trade and military commitments abroad to "focus on problems here at home"; hopefully, to a less crude extent than the guy we eventually got OTL.

What do you think?