The key to victory is in the losing margins

There is a fight for the fringes going on. Whoever wins that battle will win the war.

Every election cycle we are told there has been massive re-calibration of the electorate and that, in order for our chosen party to succeed next time, we need to ‘un-learn’ everything we know about the way people vote.

There is some historic precedent to this. The South changing hand from Democrat to Republic is probably the most explicit. But more recently, Texas bleeding Blue and Wisconsin turning Red show that, to put it mildly, conventional wisdom cannot always be relied on.

This cycle we are operating off the back of an election where an over-sized orange man child came from 1% in the polls to beat possibly the most qualified candidate of all time (albeit losing by over 3 million votes in the process). Trump achieved this, at least in part, by appealing to a committed, unshakeable base. He has also expressed, as clearly as his intelligence allows, that it is his intention to hold steadfast to the same base that elected him in 2016.

After being asked whether he should reach out to ‘swing voters’, he said “I think my base is so strong, I’m not sure that I have to do that”.