Opportunity, missed

Published August 23, 2016 4:03am ET



Republicans have been seething for months over their bad luck, bad judgment, or even bad karma in having been given as a nominee the one person in the country more deeply disliked than Hillary Clinton. A man whose faux pas every day push her ethical problems off the front pages, who is moving people who haven’t voted for Democrats since before 1980 over to her side en masse.

But there is another side to this tale of mischance and missed opportunities: The extremely bad luck of Donald Trump’s voters — those who have seen their jobs, their mobility, and their security evaporate since the mid-1990’s — in having their cause, their complaint, and their issue so wholly submerged in his toxicity that they barely seem to exist. True, some GOP Senate candidates have flipped on their support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. But genuine arguments over how to reverse the decline in the standards of living of Americans whose educations don’t go beyond high school have hardly been bruited, by Trump or his enemies.

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