Insight of the day — on the third anniversary of Donald Trump’s election:

“Now, there’s no way to prove that people who didn’t bother to vote, or cast a protest vote for a minor-party candidate or even for Trump while assuming he could not actually be inaugurated, cost Clinton the election (there’s actually some evidence that minor-party voting hurt Trump more than his opponent). But if you add together the substantial evidence that nonvoters skewed Democratic and consider the tactical mistakes Team Clinton seemed to make due to misperceptions of the state of the race (e.g., focusing resources on Arizona rather than Wisconsin), it’s clear the element of surprise was an important — perhaps critical — asset for the 45th president.
If so, he’s lost it for good heading toward 2020, and that could be a hidden asset for his Democratic opponent, whoever it is.” — Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine

There are a ton of factors that contributed to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. I haven’t any proof that the conventional wisdom that Clinton would win actually bolstered the number of third party votes or, more significantly, increased the number of prospective voters who just didn’t bother to cast a ballot (or even, as Kilgore suggests, pulled the lever for Trump knowing he wouldn’t win).

But it would be difficult to convince me that this isn’t so.

This won’t happen in 2020.

(Image: detail from cover of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here.)