Maggie's Farm

As soon as I heard Trump's campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again," taken directly from Reagan's first campaign, I realized he had studied Reagan's campaigns (or had his consultants study them), and then employed the same tactics. Reagan won by pulling traditional Democratic voters away from the Democrat Party, which is exactly what Trump did. He did it by focusing on issues that Americans have deep feelings on and did it in a way to have Hillary and the Democrats start demonizing such views as being racist, sexist, Islamophobic, etc. Every time they did that, he then pulled another bloc of voters away and into his camp.

As I always told my friends, Trump was the only one who could beat Hillary, because he was willing to take her head on, and would go after Democrat votes. All the other candidates would have been destroyed by Hillary. They had such a puritan, narrow conservative view, mainly made up of fixed litmus test bullet points, that they would have attracted only a narrow base of support in the end. Those were the opponents that Hillary was planning for, running against a Cruz or a Rubio, or even a Bush or Kasich who would have been painted as a Cruz or Rubio, and Trump totally upended it.