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These days, you don’t hear the word consensus very often in American politics.
The polls show Donald Trump moving up in these final weeks of the race. This means a consensus is indeed forming that he should be re-elected, and this is perhaps the first consensus we've seen in a decade.
His upward momentum in the past two weeks is so broad and he's moving up among so many voters that consensus is the only word that describes what's going on.
But what's most interesting is how he has achieved this general accord.
In our polarized politics, he is winning not so much because he is battering the Democrats into submission, finally winning the partisan debate that has sundered our nation.
No, he is achieving consensus by triangulating on the thorniest issue in our politics: abortion.
During the Clinton era, we learned that the candidate who can articulate the consensus that most voters feel, stepping over party lines, can prevail where partisan warfare fails.
In the 1990s, Democrats saw that saying "Yes" to Republican proposals like welfare reform and a balanced budget without cutting entitlements, worked where saying "No" had not.
And so, this fall, Trump has found that triangulation on abortion is working where combat has failed. Politicians are good at handing "No," but when their political opponents start saying "Yes," they're dumbfounded.
As autumn of this year approached Biden pulled out of the race, and Harris was nominated, Republicans had grown concerned.
Despite their advantage on the economy, immigration, and crime, they could not send Kamala Harris packing.
She remained nipping at their heels.
The race seemed to settle into a nail biter.
Then, over the opposition of most of his own party, Trump triangulated.
He pledged to veto a ban on abortion, backed in vitro fertilization, rejected a six-week deadline for legal abortion, and carved out exceptions to any abortion ban where the life of the mother was threatened or rape or incest was involved.
And he enlisted Melania to advocate for women's control over their own bodies.
Thus, his bright red posture on the issue began to look more like purple.
The American people are responding.
Trump began to seize leads in the popular vote and in most of the swing states.
Democrats, totally invested in the abortion issue, felt the ground eroding underneath them.
Lamely, they fell back to saying Trump was lying and that, as soon as he won, the virulent anti-abortion Democrats feared would emerge and "turn the clock back."
But as Trump persisted in triangulating the issue, Harris lost ground and the momentum swung to Trump.
In the process, Donald Trump looks like he has solved the biggest conundrum in our politics — how to find a center-right middle ground.
Dick Morris is a former presidential adviser and political strategist. He is a regular contributor to Newsmax TV. Read Dick Morris' Reports — More Here.
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