It must drive liberals insane. Not only is Donald Trump
gaining momentum in 2024, but they are saddled with a candidate they
don’t like, and he’s the president of the United States. There won’t be
much talk about abolishing the Electoral College this cycle; both men
aren't exactly winners of popularity contests. It’s irrelevant. Our
system has and will always reward candidates who have geographic
diversity. That arena favors Trump, not Biden. It’s a massive political
migraine for Democrats with a lot of territory to defend, some of which
might not even be worth packing sandbags for, along with a lengthy
debate regarding strategy among the president’s advisers on where to
go.
The three states Democrats appear to be moving into the must-win
category are Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the old blue wall. It
was predictable, though what wasn’t on the agenda was how poorly Biden
was polling in Michigan. Independents cannot stand him, which even
Democrats admit will be a project regarding mounting some turnaround
with that demographic.
Ron Brownstein had more about the
electoral math facing Biden, and if he loses Michigan, even James
Carville is quoted as saying it could be a rough night for a president
who no one seems to like, but they’re forced to vote for now. We have a
long way to go before Election Day 2024, but Biden is facing what
Brownstein described as a “last-mile” issue, appropriate for a president
who is gassed due to age and mental decline (via The Atlantic):
Even
a modest recovery in Biden’s current support could put him in position
to win states worth 255 Electoral College votes, strategists in both
parties agree. His problem is that every option for capturing the final
15 Electoral College votes he would need to reach a winning majority of
270 looks significantly more difficult.
At this point, former
President Donald Trump’s gains have provided him with more plausible
alternatives to cross the last mile to 270. Trump’s personal
vulnerabilities, Biden’s edge in building a campaign organization, and
abortion rights’ prominence in several key swing states could erase that
advantage. But for now, Biden looks to have less margin for error than
the former president.
[…]
Biden’s odds may particularly
diminish if he cannot hold all three of the former “blue wall” states
across the Rust Belt that he recaptured in 2020 after Trump had taken
them four years earlier: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
[…]
As
James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist told me, if Biden can
recover to win Michigan along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, “you are
not going to lose.” But, Carville added, if Biden can’t hold all three,
“you are going to have to catch an inside straight to win.”
For
both campaigns, the math of the next Electoral College map starts with
the results from the last campaign. In 2020, Biden won 25 states, the
District of Columbia and a congressional district centered on Omaha, in
Nebraska—one of the two states that awards some of its Electoral College
votes by district. Last time, Trump won 25 states and a rural
congressional district in Maine, the other state that awards some of its
electors by district.
The places Biden won are worth 303
Electoral College votes in 2024; Trump’s places are worth 235. Biden’s
advantage disappears, though, when looking at the states that appear to
be securely in each side’s grip.
[…]
Biden has a much
greater area of vulnerable terrain to defend. In 2020, he carried three
of his 25 states by less than a single percentage point—Georgia,
Arizona, and Wisconsin—and won Pennsylvania by a little more than one
point. He also won Michigan and Nevada by about 2.5 percentage points
each; in all, Biden carried six states by less than three points,
compared with just one for Trump. Even Minnesota and New Hampshire, both
of which Biden won by about seven points, don’t look entirely safe for
him in 2024, though he remains favored in each.
Many operatives
in both parties separate the six states Biden carried most narrowly into
three distinct tiers. Biden has looked best in Wisconsin and
Pennsylvania. Biden’s position has been weakest in Arizona, Nevada, and
Georgia. Michigan falls into its own tier in between.
[…]
Given
these unexpected patterns, Democratic strategists I’ve spoken with this
year almost uniformly agree with Carville that the most promising route
for Biden to reach 270 Electoral College votes goes through the
traditional industrial battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and
Wisconsin.
And yes, the other points now ingrained into the 2024 cycle were
reiterated: Biden is unpopular. He’s bleeding among core Democratic
Party voter groups. Young people, blacks, Hispanics, union workers, and
now Arab Americans can’t stand him. Regarding black voters, the article
added that Trump is winning one-in-six in Michigan, double his share
from 2020.
And many states that padded Biden’s 2020 Electoral
College total were clinched on the thinnest of margins. The Sun Belt
might have to be sacrificed. Can they make a run at North Carolina,
which hasn’t voted Republican since 2008? Is Georgia lost? Nevada and
Arizona will be the two states Biden hopes to hold, and he’s counting on
abortion to get him over the top there, along with Trump’s immigration
policies that could impact Latino voters. We shall see, but given
Biden’s epic collapse, along with the campus mayhem and the apparent
antisemitism coursing through the base of the Democratic Party, things
could get interesting. As for Trump, the media thought his legal issues
would hurt him. They most decidedly did not, especially with the
classified document trial being delayed indefinitely.
Despite
what CNN and MSNBC will say, the former president has one of the most
efficiently dispersed coalitions in recent memory, and that’s not
conservative media saying that—it’s liberal data scientist David Shor,
formerly of the Center for American Progress. In a 2021 interview with New York Magazine, Shor observed that obsessing over Trump’s popularity numbers is a waste of time:
So Donald Trump is unpopular. And he does pay a penalty
for that relative to a generic Republican. But the voters he’s popular
with happen to be extremely efficiently distributed in
political-geography terms.
Imagine Hillary Clinton had run
against Marco Rubio in 2016. Rubio is a less toxic figure to the public
as a whole, so let’s say he performed as a generic Republican would have
been expected to, and Hillary Clinton’s share of the two-party vote
fell to 49.6 percent. If she had maintained Obama’s coalition — if her
49.6 percent had the same ratio of college-to-non-college-educated
voters as Obama had in 2012 — she would have won that election. And
then, if you look at the implications that would have had down-ballot,
especially in the Senate, Republicans would have been a lot worse off
with a narrow majority coalition — that had a Romney-esque split between
college and non-college voters — than they were with the Trump
coalition.
So I think the Trump era has been very good for the Republican Party…
Indeed.
Biden’s
numbers leech into his core supporters. There’s a difference; the
president lacks the political skill to turn things around. The Democrats
have gotten ahead of their skis concerning their political assumptions.
It’s what happens when a band of snobs becomes undone by their
arrogance. There’s no pandemic to save Biden this time.
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