She’s a very clever politician. She acted all wild, crazy super-MAGA when Trump’s popularity was waxing and she needed to build popularity in her very red home state. Now she’s got her seat more-or-less locked in and she is preparing for a run for president, so the insanity is toned down quite a bit and she is expressing views that have quite a bit of national popularity.

She’s planning to run for President. And she is much more in touch with popular sentiment than Trump, who doesn’t care about elections anymore.

Basically, it comes down to two pivotal decisions on the part of the Democrats. First was Obama’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, in which he chose to bail out the banks and let average Americans get screwed over, setting the stage for a decade or so of “bimodal” recovery in which the rich were doing well while working people increasingly struggled. Second was the Democratic Party’s suppression of Bernie Sanders’s candidacy.

The general trend is that the Democratic Party has been unwilling to (a) acknowledge real economic pain that working Americans are/were experiencing and (b) oppose the interests of economic elites. Instead they have sought to focus on race and gender issues, and often in a kind of high-handed, censorious way, while making it clear that if they are in power “nothing fundamental is going to change,” even though the system is increasingly not working for many Americans.

Trump arrived, promising to shake things up and was able to articulate the struggles that working Americans were facing.

What I can’t explain through all this, is how he won the second time. And this is probably because he didn’t actually win the second time.