"Trump wins only through psychological voter suppression.
At the same time, it would certainly be foolish to insist, in this year of political surprises, that Trump can’t win. He could—especially if, as Thomas Edsall suggested in a carefully reasoned May 11 column, more white voters are keen to pull the lever for Trump than will admit it to pollsters. Trump’s unlikely but conceivable route to victory lies in only one direction: in the same low turnouts that powered his standing as the presumptive Republican nominee. In other words, by turning the general election into a primary. Trump wins only through psychological voter suppression: a protracted campaign of such ugliness, directed at a Democratic nominee already widely disliked and mistrusted, that vast numbers of voters in key electoral college states become even more alienated from politics than they are now and stay home in November, as they did in March and April. Trump’s road to the White House is therefore through what Jesse Jackson, describing how low Democratic and African-American turnout helped elect Nixon and Reagan, used to call “the margin of our despair.”
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