Can progressives learn anything from Republicans?

[Brian37]

Right about now, Trump and the Koch brothers and the rest of the Republican party have me disgusted.  The way they're governing is going to leave a scar across the world that will last long after they're gone. And to me and a lot of other intelligent, educated people, we see Trump is an orange skinned windbag with no redeaming qualities as president.  Not only that, but Republicans haven't had a decent president since before I was born.  

But there's one big question: why do they keep winning?

I mean, serious, they've had a habit of nominating complete morons as president and those morons win.  How?  I had hoped after the disaster that was the Dubya presidency, we would have learned our lesson and not voted for idiots.  Then Trump came along and we threw that lesson right out the window.  I would have hoped after the mess they left the economy, we would know better than to believe that tax cuts for the plutocrat class are going to help anyone else.  But those same people are cheering on Trumps tax cuts, the ones that are mostly paying out to the people who benefited from the Bush bailouts.

I guess my question is, why do republicans keep winning with such bad ideas?  And whatever the method to the madness is, can democrats harness that for their good ideas?

Because most humans are tribal. In a very real evolutionary sense, because we are social, and that grouping produces safety in numbers, far too often we will buy a falsehood because it is appealing rather than testing the data to be sure it is accurate.

I would say though, the best thing for democrats to do is stop playing defense and relying on all our old haunts and convey the message that poor rural whites are getting screwed just like poor urban blacks. Our base is solid, but it isn't enough, we need to play offence and take away the narrative from the GOP who has controlled it since Reagan.

It isn't impossible for democrats to win in red states. Montana has a democratic GOV, Oklahoma has also had a democratic gov.

If we push post WW2 policies, the policies that built our middle class and the rust belt, the GOP will lose.