How many more voters can he dig up? How many people that voted against him in 2020 would vote for him in 2024? And, perhaps most importantly, how far can the GOP rig the vote to get him in.
In 2016 he lost the popular vote by 2.87 million votes and won the EC by about 80,000 votes.
In 2020 he lost the popular vote by over 7 million votes and lost the EC by about 40,0000 votes (would have been an EC tie).
Factoring in various demographic changes, I see no reason to expect that he wouldn’t lose the 2024 popular vote by at least the same amount, and it could be quite a bit more. The EC will change a bit due to the new census numbers, but that won’t be enough to save him. But the gap between the “tipping point” state and the popular vote keeps getting larger and larger.
The demographic changes you mention mean nothing when state legislatures controlled by the GOP are passing laws giving themselves the authority to toss any ballots they don’t like. Altering the outcome in states like PA, GA, MI and WI would be very easy to do once they have the power to throw out votes from any urban counties that go to the D’s. This is happening now and will be complete before 2024.
I think we need to consider there are a significant number of Trump voters that don’t necessarily like Trump, but rather his policies. I don’t think they’re going to back Trump when they can back another with the potential for two terms.
Yes, I understand and am extremely worried about that. I think there are actually (at least) three different questions:
Can Trump win the 2024 election “fairly” simply by using new legislation to reduce voter turnout in urban areas and keeping/expanding his support in rural areas and with the Hispanic population?
Can Trump win the 2024 election “fairly” without even needing reduced turnout but because he remains popular and Biden (or another Democratic nominee) becomes unpopular?
Can Trump win the 2024 election because our entire electoral system is subverted by allowing partisan legislatures overrule the clear will of their states’ voters?
I was talking about 1 and 2. 3 is too terrifying to contemplate, but it’s clear that a majority of the GOP currently supports that option (they will dress it up with the Big Lie, of course). They believe that the cost of the opposition winning is higher than the cost of not having a representative republic anymore. I’m not sure how that gets walked back, and it’s clear that the current GOP non-Trump leadership has no intention of walking it back.
Maybe not, but every poll that’s come out since the 2020 election shows that Trump is a runaway favorite for the nomination, so much so that it’s unlikely anyone other than fringe candidates would challenge him if he decides to run. One example: Trump Emerges From Impeachment Trial With Sturdy Backing From GOP Voters
We have to look at next year when AAUI, Individual-ONE has many billions in notes coming due. He might be able to shuck-and-jive his way past that, but it could bigly damage his brand if he becomes financially compromised.
How much would Putin and Xi need to pay to cover those debts to keep Trump in the game? Pocket change on the scale of their countrys’ budgets, that’s how much. And then their control of Trump would be as complete as possible; even his next generation of grifters would know who owns them. For life.
That isn’t really going to be how any of those laws work. The court system will not allow legislatures to strike down properly cast ballots. Now can they make real shitty rules that make it easy to file a “bad ballot”? Sure, they actually already did that years ago. But the lion’s share of people do actually manage to fill out ballots correctly–especially since by 2024 I suspect most voting will be back to in person, where it is generally much less likely you can get a spoiled ballot.
There is nothing the Republican state legislatures are doing that removes general constitutional protections and standards of due process from our society.
The real way to rig the vote would be to make an explicit change saying that the State legislature would select the electors–that is how many states did it during the early days of the Republic, and there is no Federal constitutional bar from going back to that system, just a “political” one. But they have not done that as of yet.
I think it’s worth to point out the difference between the plausible reality that Trump could win in 2024, and the unsupported conjecture that Trump is some unbeatable wizard who is going to end democracy and cannot be stopped in 2024. I think it ignores the role of the courts and how our election machinery really works, and let’s be honest–the Democrats are massively exaggerating what most of the Republican election laws do for political purposes. I think that’s good politics, and worth doing, but it also can confuse people who should know better when it comes to discussions like these. The reality is there is little real evidence these vote suppression shenanigans do that much or have ever done that much.
The stuff that really disenfranchises people is stuff that actually puts true bars to voting ala old Jim Crow laws. In the modern era lots of shady shit that people assume will “suppress minority turnout” has consistently not really proven to do it to any significant degree. In fact in many states with shitty laws, the targeted minorities have a higher voter participation rate than whites.
Other things to consider is that, hilariously, in Republican states like Georgia and Florida, a lot of the laws they are changing are laws that were written to advantage Republicans based on historical voting patterns. This belief that Republicans now have a permanent disadvantage due to mail voting is a highly questionable one, when it has frequently been Republican operatives leading mail voting drives in Southern states, and before 2020 the GOP frequently voted by mail at higher rates in those states than Democrats. Remember the GOP coalition trends older and more rural, two things that can make getting to the polls less convenient. The Democrats trend young and urban, which means even if the line at the poll is long, it’s not a 20 mile drive away–and when you’re 89 years old maybe you can’t drive 20 miles anymore.
Luntz also largely has the “right of it” when he mentions there is an observable effect that just painting our democracy as invalid, actually works to suppress votes. You actually see this in other countries, where if a minority (which the Republicans are) feel that the process is unfair, they frequently just stop voting. This actually then cements their status as a failed party.
Another thing is if any of Trump’s coalition shifts are permanent, he has basically traded white, educated, suburban voters for less educated rural white voters. That sort of voter is historically a “lower propensity” voter, who will be harder to get to the polls consistently to begin with.
Quoted for truth. If Republicans actually want to win elections, their task is to carve out more votes from the undecideds, or convince Democrats to stay home. But, if there ever even was a tranche of voters that were “undecided”, Republicans have basically annihilated them with their polarizing antics. There’s nowhere to run now except for the sweet sweet safety of Jim Crow voter suppression.
But can (or will) the courts act quickly enough to correct election results altered by these actions? I can imagine a scenario where Wisconsin illegally disqualifies enough urban votes to have the GOP candidate win the state, and by the time the challenge works its way up to the SCOTUS the GOP candidate has already been sworn in as president.
I won’t comment one way or another about the reliability of DC report, but like Trump’s claims these seem heavy on speculation and very light (ie non existent) on real evidence. McConnell may not have had a good approval rating, but in head to head polling against McGrath he was doing very well. 538 gave McConnell a 96% chance of victory, with an expected margin of 13 points. If I was an evil Republican looking for a race to cheat in, this race would be near the bottom of my list.
I don’t have a vested interest in DC Report, but keep in mind as I’ve already said, the author is not claiming anything happened. She is claiming there are results that are anomalous when you consider other data, and they should be investigated. In an era of fake news I really think it’s unfair for a reputable outlet to have its articles misrepresented and then attacked for that false representation–DC Report has not said the Kentucky Senate election was stolen, full stop.
Now I will say I read the article, and I think there’s a simpler explanation for the anomalies she details than fraud or election stealing. The big argument is she relies a lot on places where Democrats have registration advantages in Eastern Kentucky, but Mitch won in a landslide. She considers this anomolous.
This is not actually weird/unusual at all. Starting about 20 years ago, there began a big shift in rural Appalachia and in the rural South away from the Democrat party to the GOP. These regions of coal miners, small hold farmers and etc formed an ancestral “base” of the Democrats going back literally to the time of Jefferson. However as culture wars became more paramount, many of these voters switched to the GOP–these voters had always been more culturally conservative, and many of the Democrats they voted for or sent to Congress were pro-life etc (a breed of elected Democrat at the Federal level of which basically only Joe Manchin remains as a survivor.)
Many of these regions were in fact historically so strongly Democrat that the party almost ruled those areas as a “one party state” so to speak, in that the Democratic primary was usually deciding who won the general. This lead to an effect where a huge portion of the electorate in those regions was registered as Democrat. Now, as we’ve seen all over the country, as lower income rural whites have shifted away from voting for Democrats, their registrations rarely shift at the same time. Many people put very little thought or energy into which party they are registered to vote with, because remember most voters rarely bother to vote in primary elections, in which turnout is always much lower. Registering to vote takes effort and switching registrations does as well, and if you only bother to vote in general elections anyway, your party registration actually has little or no real impact on your life. So it has been the case that areas which used to be dominated by Appalachian Democrats and Southern Democrats have become bright red, the Dems often have continued to maintain their historical registration advantage in those regions.
Eastern Kentucky is actually a really good example of this–the region has been going deep red in damn near every election in the last 10 years, in spite of the Democrats having a registration advantage. The TLDR is contrasting who someone is registered with versus vote outcomes probably isn’t a good way to detect potential fraud, since many voters register with a party when they first register to vote, and never update their registration for the rest of their lives–but that doesn’t mean they never alter their voting preferences.