Elliptical orbits

Salena Zito is generally worth reading, though I'll warn you that if (like my husband) you dislike the "pithy comments from the man on the street" style of political analysis, you should skip the first half-dozen paragraphs.

Zito sees the political landscape as undergoing a tectonic shift.  First there is a long build-up of tension, as voters increasingly conclude they are being lied to by unserious people, then there is a catastrophic realignment.  The 2020 outcome perhaps depends on the resolution of a deep ambivalence in the suburbs.  Right-centrist voters long for dependability and civility, without always troubling themselves much about pure policy, but at some point they rebel against outright socialism even in its more pastel tones.

In the meantime, populist voters from both the left and right are an unpredictable disruptive force:

Democratic populists seek to copy Trump's success but not to win back the same populist voters who flipped margins by 32 points from 2012 to 2016 in places like Ashtabula, Ohio, or 18 points in Erie, Pennsylvania, both of which we profiled in "The Great Revolt." Democrats such as Warren and Sanders have given up on winning those places--and those Obama voters.

Instead, Sanders and Warren hope to emulate Trump's success with their party's version of the voters we called Perotistas, those whose participation in elections is irregular, even elliptical, and who pass into voting booths every decade or so like comets crashing into an otherwise orderly solar system, only to disappear just as abruptly.