Lots of pollsters, even Nate Silver, have Donald Trump ahead in this election. I’m not convinced. In his debate tonight with Joe Biden, Trump would do well to remember what he has apparently forgot: his own forgotten men and women. His allegiance to their interests, and willingness to offend their enemies, is what gave his 2016 campaign a vandal thrill and momentum.
“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no more,” Trump said in his victory speech in 2016. It was his attempt to give substance to his campaign’s implicit and inchoate message: For too long, the United States had been governed narrowly, in the interests of a small class. Trump’s election was a rebuke to that class, and many voters experienced it as an eschatological reckoning for American democracy — the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.
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