Why the next Republican Presidential Candidate will be a Hispanic Woman

Einstein is claimed to have said that compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. I beg to differ – I recon the law of unintended consequences gives compound interest a run for its, Trump will eventually force the Republicans to face up to and solve five seemingly insurmountable problems that have been dogging American politics for decades. Their resolution will bring about more world peace than Bob Dylan ever will and will culminate in someone like Susana Martinez, the 31st?Governor?of?New Mexico?and chairwoman of the?Republican Governors Association, becoming the next Republican Presidential Candidate in 2024 - whatever the outcome of today's election.

1. Helping a woman to crack the ultimate glass ceiling: The level of sexism that America’s seemingly politically-correct men and many of its women have unmasked has horrified the world. We all quietly tolerated the fact that women earn 77 cents to the dollar compared to men despite the fact that women are better educated. But it took a candidate with Donald Trump’s cartoon-like vileness to clear the way for the most qualified presidential candidate in history to overcome the insurmountable barrier of her gender. Any other male candidate that the Republicans put forward would have trounced her. As has been the case since Shakespeare, the joker has the wisest words – in the Saturday Night Live spoof of the second debate, the Hillary impersonator, Kate McKinnon, when asked to say something nice about the other candidate, answered with a delightful smugness that she was grateful to the Donald for being the only candidate the other side could have put forward - who was more hated than she was.

I look forward to a 2020 Presidential debate when President Clinton finally has to answer Ken Bone’s climate change question when she debates coal with an intractable anti-green Republican ticket of the formidable El Paso-born governor of New Mexico,?Susana Martinez, and her vice-presidential running mate - South Carolina Governor?Nikki Haley.?

2. Reducing the level of polarisation of US politics: The naked hostility Trump displayed when promising to jail his opponent in front of a live US TV audience of 100 million and the admission that he boasted about sexually assaulting women, was what it took for a quarter of Republican women to overcome their visceral hatred for the other side and to vote for against their party’s candidate. Many decent fundamentalist Christians, socially conservative Catholics (of whom I am one) and educated women could not face four years of a President in their living room – where they might need an X-rating at any time when analysts bought up his gutter room talk, discussed whether he did or didn’t have an 18-month affair with a Playboy Playmate of the Year and argued whether his wife’s naked pictures were artistic or lesbian pornography. Without realizing it, these Republican college graduates are breaking the polarisation that has allowed Democrat-Republican gerrymandered duopoly to render Congressional election votes meaningless.

3. Giving Hispanic and other minorities the voice they never knew they had: When Donald Trump called Mexicans rapists and criminals and threatened to deport them, he succeeded in doing what social activists have been trying and failing to do for decades – getting Hispanics to the ballot box. Only 27% of Hispanics and other non-African American minorities voted in Texas in 2012 – if they had voted at the levels of whites or African Americans – they would control the political destiny of the state. Trump has spurred them into action in a way that nobody expected - early voting in 2016 in Southern Texas, Arizona and Nevada mean that the South West will be out of bounds to Republicans for a generation – in the same way that California Governor Pete Wilson found with Proposition 187 in 1992. Read the link, it gives a dizzying sense of Déjà vu. While it is unlikely Hillary will win Texas in 2016, Trump has ensured Lone Star state will be the most closely fought swing state in the 2020 election. A devastating psychological blow for the Republican Party, which regarded Texas as the party’s spine and which won the Presidential election in 2004 because the Spanish-speaking George W Bush increased its share of the Hispanic vote to 40% from 35% in 2000.?

4. Listening to America’s victims of globalisation: When Reagan won all states in the 1984 Presidential Whitewash, he lost only his opponent’s home state, Minnesota. The Gopher State was henceforth known as the most Blue State of the Union. It is a state with a sense of humor – it elected Jesse Ventura in 2000, the conspiracy theorist professional wrestler as Governor. Now thanks to shy Trump supporters among blue-collar workers, Union members, non-college-educated white men, and pension-less septuagenarians, the Republicans will win Ohio and could win Michigan and yes even Minnesota. This will give the GOP tens of millions of voters they really would rather do without - they secretly agree that they are a "basket of deplorables". Both sides could previously ignore this demographic, based on their voting behavior – there is an 85% probability that a woman with a PhD will vote, whereas only 15% of men with less than nine years of formal education, tend to cast their ballot. With the tide of demographics moving against Republicans to the South West, both they and the Democrats will need to listen to these people as they fight to keep them.

5. Highlighting just how pervasive shady vested interests have become in controlling of the election process: At the turn of the 21st century, Koch Industries was fined over $400 million when they were found guilty of multiple environmental violations. The billionaire Koch Brothers took it rather personally and have responded by spending hundreds of millions more to influence elections ever since with $889 million in this election's down-ticket races to put in republican candidates. In an unrelated development, the Kochs have paid fewer fines since – no doubt because of better environmental management control. And let's not forget my favorite -?Harold Simmons, the late Texas Sugar Beet billionaire who received an obscure tax deduction that no other citizen in the United States could benefit from after a $1 million “donation” to the Texas Republican Party in 1996. Or the Wall Street bankers who got $787 billion in bailouts in 2009 after which no banker was charged with wrongdoing. Or the Goldman Sachs bankers who managed to achieve a feat that no Mafia boss ever did – causing 40% of the Teamsters' pensions to disappear in 2008. Trump's and Sanders' supporters claimed the system was rigged, but in the mainstream, these practices were somehow tolerated as the electorate turned a blind eye to both parties succumbing to the wiles of the all-powerful lobbyists.

Trump, as is his unique reductio ad absurdum way, has globalised cronyism: His dependence on former USSR Oligarch buyers of overpriced Florida real estate was inevitable after his fourth high-profile corporate bankruptcy. The bankruptcy of Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009 finally meant that Wall Street was no longer prepared to lend to any construction project associated with him. And construction needs loans as well as equity and eventual buyers, so the only lenders who would consider him were the Russians and the Germans. The problem is that these Russian bank loans have given a former KGB head of state a chance to puppeteer a Republican candidate into compromising NATO and even backing his annexation of the Crimea. And here is the weird thing, I doubt if Trump and Putin have ever spoken meaningfully to each other showing how pervasive this indirect control is.

Most right-thinking Americans are genuinely horrified that they risk state capture from a hostile foreign power that conspires with a candidate of a major party to use cyber terrorism to manipulate a result of an election that could result in a 3rd world war on Europe’s doorstep (Source Michael Fallon - Britain's tory defence minister). Trump does not do apologizing, but even he was forced to fire Paul Manafort when it was revealed that shady pro-Russian Ukrainian billionaires and Putin-aligned heads of state paid him $12 million dollars via a handwritten ledger. This could be the turning point in cleaning up the chronic abuse of party funding. Ironic – as it has resulted from the actions of a candidate who got little of his money from traditional Republican donors.

Despite itself, the GOP leadership is desperately praying for Donald to lose on Tuesday and to lose big. Strangely, while the Democrats want him to lose, they want him to lose small, as a narrow defeat will delay the Republican party’s wholesale reform, as it lingers towards the same death its older white male voters face. If he wins, the Republican Party will be destroyed in five years as it will be impossible to distance itself from the orgy of misogyny, nativism and Putinist disengagement he has unleashed. If he loses big, a new McMullin wing of the GOP will have the mandate it needs to enact the leaf-and-branch reform to show that Trump was an aberration and that does not represent the tolerant but conservative soul of Republicanism.

A more gender-sensitive, more diverse and less sanctimonious Republican Party will be a force for good that stretches far beyond the Rio Grande. I look forward to a 2024 Presidential debate when the blue presidential candidate finally has to answer Ken Bone’s climate change question when she debates coal with an intractable anti-green Republican ticket of the formidable El Paso-born governor of New Mexico, Susana Martinez, and her vice-presidential running mate - South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.?And the only people to whom it will matter that Mrs Haley was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa to a family of Indian Sikh immigrants - are the seventeen remaining followers of the Trump Twitter account.