Drop Obama by a time machine helicopter into the 1970s, and he's a moderate Republican.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1956

This was the approximate timeline of my interest in politics, so I got to see it firsthand from the Kennedy administration forward. Like most anti-war/pro-civil rights activists who came of voting age in the '60s, I was firmly in the Republican camp.

When I was getting my head thumped with a baton, bitten by a police dog, or knocked off my feet with a firehose in a demonstration the one thing I could bank on was that it was a Democrat inflicting my pain.

I don't think this pendulum swiing has much to do with the education or lack of education among the masses. It's mostly just been an outstanding propaganda effort by right-wing Republicans. Props to them, I guess, for winning the battle of the mind.

This was before the Powell memo that established the playbook for ratcheting American politics to the right. However, that involved a corrupt and feckless Democratic party that could have held the line at any point in that evolution. This has been proven by history, but never better than in the Clinton administration when almost every point of the GOP agenda was set in stone or advanced by a Democrat administration.

The other thing wrong with that statement is that Trump showed the exact opposite - non-voters turned out for him, not the Democrats.

I don't know a lot of Democrats who think that non-voters are by definition progressives. And evidence has pointed the opposite direction.

Being wrong never deterred a good propagandist. The "get out the vote" effort is touted by almost every progressive I know or contact. Their problem is that they are using the same fear porn, only from an opposite perspective, that the right-wing uses to get their true believers to the polls.

They largely involve social issue hot points that would be mostly made moot by strong economic leadership. Even those who recognize this and promote strong safety nets and raising the minimum bar for being poor are convinced that the only way to do so is by taxing the rich and their corporations. They are nothing but fundraisers for their opposition.