Concord, N. Hampshire, Feb. 9, 2016 -- Major media outlets announce that Sanders and Trump have won the New Hampshire primaries, only a week after each placed first in the Iowa Caucuses. Democratic and Republican establishments start to panic.
Game on.
What 6 months ago seemed impossible and two months ago seemed improbable would then become not only possible but probable: Voters' rejection of the governing elite and the donor class in both political parties.
Indeed, most recent polling already indicates a Sander/Trump match-up as far from impossible. On the Republican side, Trump leads national polls by a large margin, is neck and neck with Cruz in Iowa, and holds a substantial lead in New Hampshire. Sanders trails Clinton by the margin of error in 2 recent Iowa polls and is leading by the margin of error in another; Sanders leads Clinton by 4%-13% in various New Hampshire polls; and in at least one national poll is within 4 points of Clinton. Polls also show Sanders defeating Trump in a general election by larger margins than Clinton.
Other than being outsiders in their respective parties, there's little in common between Sanders's policy-specific social democracy to combat economic inequality and Trump's vague nationalistic nativism that promises to make his supporters as rich as he is. But the divide between Democratic and Republican Party elites and large donors, on the one hand, and grass-roots voters, on the other, has nearly reached the breaking point in both parties.
It's conceivable that this could become the most transformative and disruptive American election since...well...maybe 1860. That election ended the Whig Party, split the Democratic Party in two, and established the Republicans as one of the 2 major national parties for the past century and a half. Ultimately, Lincoln's election led to the secession of Southern States and a Civil War that killed 750,000 Americans and reshaped American politics and economics for the next century.
No one is predicting that America will descend into bloody civil war. But the country hasn't been this politically polarized in ages. And the federal government is gridlocked, unable to grapple with the country's biggest problems including slow economic growth, stagnating wages, the collapse of the middle class, a political system dominated by big money and the revolving door, climate change, the descent of large swatches of the Middle East into anarchy, and America's diminished ability to dominate world events.
Elected Republicans have spent decades promising their base that they'd shrink government, eliminate deficits, abolish the Affordable Care Act, and ban abortion and gay marriage. Instead Republican-elected officials have enacted tax breaks and special interest legislation for the corporate class that fund the party.
Democratic leaders have promised to reduce economic inequality, but while unemployment has been halved under Obama, wages have stagnated, almost all the economic gains since the Great Recession have gone to the top 10%, the Obama administration has seen a parade of Wall Street operatives go back and forth through the revolving door between government and business, and the Clintons have collected tens of millions in speaking fees from the likes of Goldman Sachs.
One of the few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on is that the rich have more influence on the government than average voters. A recent New York Times poll indicates that 66% of Americans think the wealthy have a greater chance to influence elections that ordinary Americans and only 31% think they have an equal chance. 84% think money has too much influence in politics, 5% think it has too little, and 10% thinks it's about right. 85% think the system of funding elections needs either fundamental change or to be completely rebuilt, and 13% think it only needs minor change.
Moreover, the latest research shows that the majority of Americans are correct in their belief that the wealthy have a greater chance to influence elections than the average voter. A 2014 study by Princeton' Martin Gilens and Northwestern's Benjamin Page concluded that the influence of ordinary Americans registers as "non -significant, near zero level" after controlling for the power of economic elites and organized interest groups. The policy preferences of business and the rich sharply diverge from those of common citizens, and when they do, the economic elites and business interest almost always win and the ordinary Americans lose. They conclude, "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impact on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass based-interest groups have little or no independent influence."
Increasingly, voters in both parties are saying, in Bernie Sander's words, "enough is enough".
Will it be sufficient for Trump and Sanders to capture their respective nominations? It's possible, but both also have roadblocks in their road to the nomination. With a multi-candidate primary, even if Trump wins the most delegates coming into the Republican convention, he's likely to have only a plurality. The Republican establishment could rally around an alternative to deny him the nomination. The result could be a split in the Republican Party as much of the base feels betrayed and deserts the party. Or a Trump nomination could also split the Republican Party, with the establishment abandoning their party's Presidential nominee.
The Democrats are slightly less divided than the Republicans between the Sanders/Warren wing and the corporate elite wing. But a Sanders victory in Iowa and New Hampshire would throw Democratic elites into full panic mode. Hillary's operatives on the Democratic National Committee, let by Debbie Wasserman Shultz, have slanted the rules to place major potholes in front of an insurgent campaign. They've limited Democratic debates to only 6, mostly appearing when few people are watching TV, in order to prevent the less-known Sanders from gaining the visibility that the more famous Clinton has. They've scheduled a series of Southern primaries--where Clinton is far better known among African American voters than Sanders--to follow quickly on the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, which except in the case of Obama, have proved the trip-wire for insurgent Democratic candidates in recent decades. If worst comes to worst, unelected Superdelegates, who make up nearly 20% of voters at the Democratic convention, would swing a closely contested primary race to Clinton. But party leaders must also recognize that such a move is the likeliest way to split the Democratic Party.
So it's now becoming increasingly possible that the Republicans could nominate Trump and the Democrats could nominate Sanders, creating one of the greatest disruptions to the established political order in American history.
Even if the elites manage to stave off the challenge and the parties nominate status quo candidates like Clinton or Rubio, it will be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. Either or both political parties will be dramatically changed, and could even split apart. The political ramifications of ordinary Americans asserting their voices against organized elites will continue to be felt in American politics for years to come, whatever the outcome in 2016
This is indeed an historical election.