Ignoring the concerns of large numbers of voters

Glenn Reynolds writes at USA Today,

...as The New York Times recently noted, the benefits of this "recovery" have gone almost entirely to the rich. "In the first three years of the current expansion, incomes actually fell for the bottom 90% of earners, even as they rose nicely for the top 10%. The result: The top 10% captured an impossible-seeming 116% of income gains during that span. ... One percent of the population, in the first three years of the current expansion, took home 95% of the income gains."

Sanders' solutions might be ill-conceived, but at least he's talking about a problem that the incumbent, and the front-runner, are largely happy to ignore. And though, as an aged, openly Socialist, white male, he might not have been the dream candidate, Sanders draws enthusiastic crowds who are grateful that someone is speaking to their concerns.

Likewise, Trump. His signature issue is immigration. The GOP establishment likes open borders because its big corporate donors want cheap labor. (The Democratic establishment likes open borders because immigrants usually vote Democratic.) But many ordinary Americans — mostly, but not at all exclusively, Republicans — wonder what's in it for them. More immigrants means more competition for jobs, pushing wages down, whether it's at entry-level unskilled jobs, or at the higher-level tech jobs where employers abuse H1B visas to bring in cheap foreign labor.

Most GOP pols won't touch this issue, which pairs the risk of scaring off immigration-dependent donors with the added danger of being called racist by Democrats. Trump doesn't care, so he is willing to raise the issue anyway. And he has done so effectively: Two weeks ago, the immigration template involved stories about "DREAMers" who want to go to college; now it involves multiple-arrested undocumented immigrants who kill women. Trump might not be the ideal candidate of the Republican Party's discontented members either, but, again, they're grateful that someone is talking about their concerns instead of trying to bury them.

Both Sanders and Trump pose threats to their respective establishments. Sanders might be another Eugene McCarthy, who garnered tremendous enthusiasm in 1968 while sapping the energy of Democratic establishment candidate Hubert Humphrey, who went on to lose. Trump might turn out to be another Ross Perot, whose plain talk about deficits excited a lot of GOP voters who then saw George H.W. Bush as an unappetizing substitute.

In a democratic polity, you can't ignore the concerns of large numbers of voters forever. Both Democrats and Republicans are learning that lesson yet again.

Read more here.