Chuck Schumer in July 2016 not worried about losing blue collar Democrat votes in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Wisconsin. He said for each they lose they'll pick up 2-3 moderate, suburban Republicans-CNN, 10/4/17

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10/4/17, "Could Washington's centrist dream help Trump win a second term?" CNN Politics, Gregory Krieg 

"During a live interview hours before Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in Philadelphia, he (Sen. Chuck Schumer) was asked if Donald Trump's blunt appeal to white working class voters could turn the Midwest red. Schumer, the unwavering optimist, offered allies this soothing equation: 

"For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western P-A (Pennsylvania), we will pick up two or three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia," he reasoned, "and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin. The voters who are most out there figuring out what to do are not the blue-collar Democrats. They are the college-educated Republicans, who lean Republican, or independent and in the suburbs." 

It is a remarkable riff, and not only for the sheer tonnage of faulty assumptions the now-minority leader manages to pack into such a tidy space. Schumer clearly possesses an abiding belief in the power of the political center -- that there is no populist swell the establishment cannot divert, manage and make to find its level.

This particular hubris is not his alone. In 2016, most Democrats (Republicans too), the Clinton campaign and the pundit class seemed to be working off a similar analysis. All but a few lonely observers missed out on the uprising that would deliver -- if only just -- Trump to the White House a few months later.... 

Though Biden is obviously keen to set himself apart from Clinton, their ideology is almost identical -- technocratic hearts in thrall to market wisdom. Both are dedicated to mapping out paths of least resistance, rather than running the risk of alienating entrenched interests by, in the Sanders vein, seeking to clear the way with a bulldozer.

In this regard, Kasich and Biden, contra the implicit sales pitch, make for the most ordinary of bedfellows. Together, they proudly represent a receding brand of centrism their respective parties' rank-and-file regard with increasing or outright hostility. By its very existence, their effort to bridge the "divides that exist in Washington, DC, today" doubles down on the conviction that, for all the upheaval in American culture and politics, voters are simply thirsting for a more decorous status quo.

What follows from there is simple, and familiar, because Clinton's campaign banked on it, too. It says -- like Schumer did on that Thursday afternoon in July 2016 -- that those same voters will cross party lines to back a responsible alternative to the irresponsible Trump. And that the promise of restoring the hallowed norms Trump now shreds for fun is a workable antidote to the tribalism that would make such quick partisan rearrangement improbable....

Predicting the proverbial "mood of the electorate" in the fall of 2020 is a fun, but futile parlor game. For now, the fundamental things apply: Trump's core support is firm and animated by its visceral rejection of a political class that prizes the norms and niceties being peddled by Biden and Kasich.

So a bet on either, with Ohio governor re-cast as an independent or Democrat, or any centrist aspirant in their image, would suppose that millions of voters are plotting an abrupt U-turn -- with no evidence to back it apart from a sniffing sense that progressives are ready to compromise on their dreams and the right would forswear power for better manners."

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