Trump Can't Win
The problem with the narrative that Trump can't win
The narrative claiming that Trump cannot win back the White House in 2024 is merely a narrative without any connection to reality. His opponents continue to push this narrative, but there is no evidence to suggest that Trump and his 'America First' message have lost their appeal.
Democrats make a very simple case: Biden will beat Trump, because he has already beat Trump, and if Biden beat Trump once it stands to reason that he will do it again. Although, even if you believe that Biden actually received 81 million votes in 2020 to defeat Trump the thought that he could repeat this feat is far from certain. It is not uncommon for a president to get less votes in his race for reelection.
In 1928 Herbert Hoover received 21,427,123 votes and won every state in the country accept 7. The electoral count was 444 to 87. It was a stomping! When Hoover ran for reelection in 1932 he received almost 6 million fewer votes, and only managed to win 3 states. He was defeated by FDR with an electoral count of 472 to 59. He wasn’t running against the same candidate, but there were a lot of similarities between New York Democrat and former governor, FDR and New York Democrat and former governor, Al Smith whom Hoover had stomped four years earlier.
In 1976 Jimmy Carter received 40,831,881 votes. This was one of the closest races in American history. Gerald Ford received 39,148,634 votes, and the electoral count was 297 to 240. When Carter ran for reelection in 1980 he received more than 5 million fewer votes. He was destroyed by Ronald Reagan with an electoral count of 489 to 49. He was also challenged by a Kennedy for the Democratic nomination in the primary that year, which is where Cater places most of the blame for his defeat.
George HW Bush is another example. When he ran for reelection in 1992 he received almost 9 million fewer votes. George Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Herbert Hoover all lost reelection, but two presidents of the 20th and 21st Centuries won reelection after receiving fewer votes. FDR received 1.7 million fewer votes when he won his fourth term. Although, in both of his previous reelections he received more votes. Make what you want of that. The other president to lose votes while winning reelection is Barack Obama, who received 4 million fewer votes when he won reelection in 2012. Once you understand this history it would not be farfetched to believe Joe Biden could receive less votes in 2024, even if he manages to win.
There is one president, and only one, who won more votes for his reelection, but lost. That president is Donald Trump. Trump received over 11 million more votes in 2020, and only loss because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris managed to get the most votes in American history. The question is can they repeat this history making accomplishment in 2024, and the narrative is that they did it once so they can do it again.
It is not just Democrats that are claiming Trump can’t win. There are many Republicans claiming he is a loser and a drag on the party. The most notable is Chris Christi, but there are many others. These Republicans pretend that the Republican Party was on a winning streak and then Trump came along and now the party is losing. Nothing could be more ridiculous.
Trump is the only Republican to win the White House since 2004, nearly 20 years! Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan couldn’t defeat Obama even after he lost 4 million votes in 2012. When Trump won in 2016 he carried Florida, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all states that Romney failed win in 2012. Biden was able to recapture several of these states, but not by much, and given Biden’s approval rating of around 42% for over a year, with 3/4 of the country believing we are on the ‘wrong track’ over the same amount of time, Trump could win those states again.
Obama was vulnerable in 2012, which is evident by the fact that he lost 4 million votes. After Romney snatched defeat from the jaws of victory the GOP issued a report on the party that was called an ‘autopsy report’, meaning the party was dead. Trump came along and brought life back to the GOP. All of the enthusiasm is with him and his movement. If Trump can’t win, no other Republican message or messenger has proven they can win either. The idea that the Republican party was more popular and won more before Trump is laughable. You think Chris Christie, who is calling Trump a “3-time loser”, can win?
This “3-time loser” line that Christie is using comes from the 2018 midterm, the 2020 election, and the 2022 midterm. Christie and others say Trump is the reason Republicans lost those elections, but here is what they are not telling you.
In the 2018 midterm a strong case can be made that Democrats would not have taken control of House of Representatives without the bogus Mueller investigation, or at least it would not have resulted in a ‘blue wave’. The Mueller investigation was the issue driving voters to the polls in that election, and much like what is happening today, Democrats and the media used the legal system and a phony scandal politically. They claimed Trump was a Russian asset, and that he was planning to fire Mueller to cover up his colluding with Russia. They claimed the only way he could be stopped was if Democrats took control of Congress. The media aired nightly coverage, often with leaked information from the investigation, reinforcing these narratives. It was very effective and it is not surprising that Democrats won in 2018. In the end Trump was completely innocent as he always claimed, and the FBI, DOJ, and media have been discredited.
In 2020 Trump outperformed expectations. There was a narrative being promoted about Trump before that election, that he only had a small, but loyal base of support, and that he had not been able to expand his message and grow the party. Him getting over 11 million more votes for his reelection pretty much destroyed that fable. Again, nothing like this has ever happened in American history. For an incumbent president to receive more votes and lose reelection is a first! They say he was so unpopular that despite getting over 11 million more votes he also drove increased turnout for Biden, but if he was so unpopular how did he receive over 11 more votes? It makes no sense. Trump grew the party and expanded his base.
In 2022 Trump wasn’t on any ballot, but he did endorse many candidates. In many cases these candidates sought Trump’s endorsement to help them win their primaries. Several of the candidates Trump endorsed won their primaries, but did not win a seat in Congress. Frankly, some of the people he endorsed were horrible candidates and they ran terrible campaigns.
There has been a heap of criticisms about political polling over the past decade, especially after so many polls predicting Hillary Clinton would win in 2016 got it wrong. However, in the 2022 midterm the polls pretty much got it right. Republicans performed as predicted. The polls didn’t say there was going to be a “red wave”. That was the media’s narrative. They set the expectation of a “red wave”, and then when there was no red wave they claimed that Democrats, namely Joe Biden, out performed their expectations.
Republicans won the House of Representatives, just like the polls predicted. They not only won the House of Representatives, but they won the national popular vote by over 3 million votes. This popular vote margin should have won Republicans more seats in the House, but because of the way new districts were drawn after the 2020 census many Republican districts were won by large margins.
In the Senate the polls always predicted an up hill battle for Republicans to take control. The Senate was split 50/50 before the 2022 election, so that meant Republicans only needed to win one seat from Democrats. However, Senator Pat Toomey was retiring and Republicans had to defend his seat in Pennsylvania as well.
Pennsylvania has long been a swing state, and from the moment that Toomey announced his retirement Democrats identified it as a seat they could capture. John Fetterman, a former mayor of a small suburb of Pittsburgh and the current Lieutenant Governor, won the primary handily. After the primary he was never trailing in the polls, despite suffering from a stroke that left him incapacitated. This is important, because this was a seat that Republicans held and the Democrat candidate led in the polls throughout the race. In August of 2022, when Fetterman made his first public appearance since being hospitalized after his stroke he was leading Dr. Oz by more than 10 points. Oz is one of the candidates whom Trump endorsed that ran a terrible campaign. Although, he did manage to close the gap at the end and it looked like Republicans were going to hold the seat. Dr. Oz lost the race by 5 points, roughly 260 thousand votes.
Losing Toomey’s seat meant Republicans needed to take two seats from Democrats to gain control of the chamber, and there were only 3 real opportunities. Republicans were behind in each of these states when the campaigning started, but they were close. In Arizona, Trump endorsed Blake Masters, who was trailing Democrat Mark Kelly by 5 to 7 points all the way to the end. The polls started to get tighter in the weeks before the election, and Masters was actually polling higher than Kelly on Election Day. In the end Mark Kelly won by 5 points, exactly where he had been polling for most of the race.
It was possible that Masters could have upset Kelly in that race, but the Arizona midterm was rigged. The Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs was running for Governor against another Trump endorsed candidate, Kari Lake. Hobbs refused to recuse herself from her duties as Secretary of State and she made ‘mistakes’ that benefited her and Mark Kelly while hurting Lake and Masters. For example, she ‘accidentally’ printed ballots using paper that was too small for the voting machines. On Election Day when most Republicans were voting the voting machines rejected these ballots. It caused long lines and long waits. Many people could not wait and left without voting. It wasn't a problem for Hobbs and Kelly, because they instructed their voters to vote early.
Nevada was another state where Republicans believed they could pick up a Senate seat. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto was the incumbent, and she started the race up by only 3 points on her Republican challenger and Trump endorsed candidate, Adam Laxalt. Laxalt went up by a point or two for a time, and then he was back down by a point or two, but as the election got closer Laxalt seemed to separate, and he was up by 3 points on Election Day. Neither candidate was ever up by more than 3 points in the polls throughout the race, which is within the margin of error. Cortez Masto ended up narrowly winning in a very close race by just under 8,000 votes. There was also some shenanigans in Navada when the cameras that where live streaming the counting went dark in the county with the state’s second largest city. The cameras were installed for public oversight and to give confidence that votes were being counted fairly. They went dark for 8 hours.
Georgia was the third state where Democrats were vulnerable, and where Republicans felt they could pick up a seat. Trump recruited his friend and former University of Georgia Heisman Trophy winner, Herschel Walker to run. Walker won the primary with 68% of the vote, beating the candidate closest to him by just under 650,000 votes. This meant Walker would face Senator Raphael Warnock in the general election. Walker and Warnock were polling very close, but neither of them ever polled above 50%, the threshold to win outright and avoid a runoff. The race ended up going to a runoff, as the polls suggested would happen.
It should noted that Walker was also endorsed by Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and many other Republicans. Yet, Trump is the only person that gets credit for his failure to win. It should also be noted that there were plenty of votes in Georgia to put Walker over the top. Governor Brian Kemp defeated Democrat Stacy Abrams with 2,111,572 votes. Walker received 1,908,442 votes during the first election, meaning there were over 200,000 Brian Kemp voters that did not vote for Walker. Just 40,000 of those voters would have won that seat for Republicans. Was it Trump’s endorsement, McConnell’s endorsement, or some other reason those 200,000 Republican voters did not vote for Walker? Walker made some huge gaffes and mishaps in the race, and essentially ran a terrible campaign.
I suppose it is also Trump’s fault that Mitch McConnell’s Super PAC spent millions of dollars helping Lisa Murkowski win her write-in campaign in Alaska after a Trump endorsed candidate defeated her in the primary. Instead of supporting Masters more in Arizona, or Laxalt in Nevada who lost a very close race to a Democrat, McConnell thought it was more important to help his friend defeat a Republican. This type of sabotage from within the Republican Party was evident in the 2022 midterm. McConnell would rather be in the minority with Senators who were going to play ball, then be in a majority with MAGA Senators in his caucus.
Another example of this sabotage came from Lindsey Graham. Three weeks before the 2022 midterm Graham introduced a bill to outlaw abortions nationwide after 15 weeks. Introducing this bill was clearly sabotage for several reasons. The bill had zero chance of passing in either house of Congress. It was dead on arrival. There was no reason to introduce a bill like this three weeks before the election unless you are intentionally trying to motivate Democrats to turn out on that single issue, which is exactly what happened. It also undermined Republicans and the Supreme Court, whom said abortion was a state issue that should be decided at the state level. No one can convince me that Graham did not realize the ramifications of what he was doing when he introduced this bill, but let’s blame Trump.
When Obama first entered the White House in 2009 Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, with a filibuster proof 60 seat majority in the Senate and a 79 seat majority in the House. There were Democrat governors in 29 states, and Democrats controlled 61 state legislative chambers. Obama went all over the country endorsing Democrat candidates while he was president, and he worked hard to get every candidate he endorsed elected. However, during his time in office Democrats lost over 900 state legislature seats, 12 governorships, 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats, and in 2016 after he endorsed Hillary Clinton, Democrats loss the White House. The media said that Obama had “lost his mojo”, and that the only person Obama could get elected was Obama. Still, to this day Obama’s endorsement is the most sought after endorsement for any Democrat running for any office. No one doubts his political influence. The same can be said about Trump. Just because candidates he endorsed did not win doesn’t mean he has no political influence. Ultimately it is up to the candidate to win.
Everyone said Trump could not win in 2016 when he defeated Hillary Clinton. He won! Then they said he could not grow the party and he received over 11 million more votes. He is dominating the field of other Republicans challenging him for the 2024 nomination, and I don’t believe another Republican could secure all of Trump’s voters if he is not the nominee. It will be impossible to win without them. This means Trump is likely the only Republican who can win.
Trust me, the people who are telling everyone that he can’t win know everything I have told you. They know he can win. That is why they are taking so many unprecedented measures to stop him. Think about it, if they really believed he couldn’t win they would just let voters vote and let democracy happen. That is not what they are doing!