Donald Trump is Already Making His Play For Bernie Sanders Supporters

You might expect a complicated election cycle to get less complicated as the number of candidates continues to dwindle, but it’s only getting stranger by the minute. While it looks more and more like a dispiriting Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton general election is inevitable, the question of who will actually vote for either candidate is very much up in the air. And the resolution, when it comes, could redefine the shape of party politics in America.

A Politico story today, for instance, examines the phenomenon of dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who are so adamantly against Trump that they might support Hillary Clinton. Which is crazy, on the surface, since Hillary Clinton has been the popular demon-spawn enemy of Republicans for almost 25 years. Even weirder, the Koch brothers have been making positive noises about Clinton, and it’s not at all clear that this is some kind of reverse psychology troll job.

On the flip side of that coin, Donald Trump is actively making a play to steal disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters. In his speeches, he’s been throwing progressives a bone by discussing the unfair treatment Sanders has received at the hands of the democratic establishment, and his “poor Bernie” schtick gets more involved each time. The idea here is to tap into progressives’ sense of injustice in a subtle (by his standards) attempt to position himself as their protest candidate. Today on Twitter, he doubled down on this tactic:

I would rather run against Crooked Hillary Clinton than Bernie Sanders and that will happen because the books are cooked against Bernie!

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— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 4, 2016

You can bet that for Trump, this is only the beginning—he’s eyeing the schism in the Democratic race the way a shark eyes a wounded seal. And I suppose Hillary wouldn’t turn down establishment GOP votes, as long as they’re not too embarrassingly vocal about their support. But hey, neither of these shifts will really happen…right? It’s just pre-election noise that will quiet down when it’s time to actually vote?

In fact, a total seismic shift in party politics isn’t so unthinkable. The bizarre fact is that in some ways, both of these heretical reversals of allegiance make sense. If Republican elites believe that Hillary Clinton is the candidate most favorable to the wealthy, to corporations, and to Wall Street, why wouldn’t they vote for her? And if progressives are buying Trump’s anti-free trade rhetoric, why wouldn’t they, plus poor and working class whites back him? Is it so impossible that the 2016 election come down to a rich vs. poor type of class warfare—the kind that the GOP has been fearing for decades, but that might actually prove fatal to the Democrats this time around?

The situation isn’t exactly that clear-cut, but nor is Trump acting like a total lunatic when he tries to peel off those liberal voters who prioritize the economy above all else. And that’s the crux of the madness that we’re witnessing—the Republican candidate is speaking the language of progressive economics, while the Democratic candidate has spent an entire political career cementing her reputation as a loyal supporter of Wall Street, free trade, and other corporatist policies that benefit the rich.

This strange possibility—progressives for Trump, rich Republicans for Clinton—is so crazy that it might actually come true. In a year when the working-class and middle-class bases on both wings have become disenchanted with their party leadership, the side that runs the most anti-establishment candidate has a chance to reap enormous electoral benefits across the board.