Andrew Prokop

Well, what happens next is kind of two different processes unfolding in each of the two major parties that have some similarities, but are also kind of fundamentally different on the Republican side.

It's really pretty simple.

Donald Trump wins the primary.

And once he wins, much of the previous Republican establishment wins.

is going to be on its way out.

He has no interest in them.

The party is increasingly steered by his own preferences.

And he has no use for highfalutin academic debates, arguing big picture principles and economic models in front of him.

And while there are certain economists who do hold

prominent positions in the Trump administration, they generally hold those positions if and only if they are saying what Donald Trump wants to do anyway.

Donald Trump is not interested in the wisdom of economists.

Donald Trump is interested in whether economists can lend their imprimatur and expertise to his own policy agenda that he wants to implement.

On the Democratic side, there is a bit of a different story there.

The Democratic side's confidence in the economic neoliberal establishment was increasingly shaken by this progressive challenge from the left that we saw with Bernie Sanders, that we saw with the rise of Elizabeth Warren, but also by Trump's 2016 win in and of itself.

That really shook the party's confidence that their economic policy was on the right track.

There was a lot of focus on who had been left behind from trade.

Why had Democrats lost the Rust Belt?

And some people argued that this was really about culture and about immigration and that it didn't really have that much to do with economics at all.

But others argued that Democrats' economic policies had gotten out of touch with the working class and too kind of beholden to

this kind of neoliberal view of the world.