The Trump riddle for the 2024 election
As commenter “Karmi” writes:
Trump has a lot of raw hatred against him—which brings out a lot of voters who will be voting against him…ones who would’ve probably not voted if he hadn’t been running.
Trump definitely has a great many voters energized against him by their hatred of him. Most of them are Democrats who would never vote for a Republican anyway, but quite a few are Independents and even NeverTrumper Republicans. However, are they ordinarily non-voters who are only energized to vote in order to vote against him? I think that’s a very small set.
What’s more, you can flip it around and say that “Trump brings out a lot of voters who will be voting for him…ones who would’ve probably not voted if he hadn’t been running.” I happen to think that group is much greater than the “only vote in order to cast a vote against him” group.
However, I have no way to know how big any of these groups are and have never even seen a poll that attempts to measure it. And I am firmly convinced that someone like DeSantis – whom I very much like – would not necessarily do better than Trump if the former were running this year against Biden.
There are many reasons for this. The first is that most people voting for Biden don’t just hate Trump, they hate Republicans. They hated Republicans even before Trump was elected, although his tenure in office and the propaganda around it may have deepened their hatred. But they hated Romney, too – a point brought home to me quite vividly during a book group meeting I attended in 2012 after the “binders of women” flap occurred. My fellow attendees were all dutifully mouthing the “Romney hates women” mantra as a result.
The second is that I’ve already seen DeSantis smeared as a homophobe and worse, so I have no doubt whatsoever that the smear machine would be cranked up to destroy a DeSantis or any other GOP candidate. The only questions are (1) how successful it would be, and (2) whether the most Trump-devoted voters would support that person, or whether a significant number of them would stay home if Trump weren’t running (I think, for example, that if Nikki Haley had been the GOP nominee, a significant number of Trump supporters would have stayed home).
It’s a conundrum, a riddle for which I have no answer. But it’s moot – at least, barring a flock of black swans – because Trump will be the nominee in 2024.
The GOP Presidential candidate is just Emmanuel Goldstein for the media. They always ascribe all the worst and most extreme positions to that figure, including ones they made up. Then, when the election’s over and he’s genteelly lost, they talk about how statesmanlike he is and contrast him unfavorably with today’s Icky Republican. (Trump is basically a Clinton Democrat.) It’s is easy to find any number of articles from 2023 about how DeSantis is far worse than Trump:
Who’s more dangerous — Trump or DeSantis?
An ex-GOP Florida congressman who opposed Trump says DeSantis would be ‘far more dangerous’ if elected president
Believe It: A DeSantis Presidency Could Be Even Worse Than Trump
It gets worse because they also deliberately represent their own guy in a false light too. For example they knew all along that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama didn’t really oppose gay marriage and probably never had.
If they do it to anyone anyway, then why go with Trump given his baggage? The reason there is a) he has a record in office now and b) everyone has already formed their opinion of who Trump is. The media can invent their Emmanuel Goldstein hallucination but the low-information voters have known Trump for 40 years now. The Karens and cat ladies in the Dem base can shriek their Two Minutes Hate and even believe it, but the people who only get up to vote once every four years are not seeing Trump for the first time through the Goldstein lens.
For example, here to this group it makes a difference whether Trump had an affair with Stormy Daniels or not. But I’m sure that the LIVs have already assumed he did, and probably with other porn actresses, and it doesn’t change anything for them.
But moot given ballot harvesting and whatnot.
Well, what did Democrats expect? That the GOP was going to run Jeb Bush? They’d call him a nazi too.
Back in 2012, Harry Reid said Mitt Romney didn’t pay his taxes. They piled on over the “binders of women” gaffe. They tried a gotcha question about birth control. Biden said “they’re gonna put ya’ll back in chains.” Obama said if he had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin.
By 2016, GOP voters were fed up and wanted someone who’d fight back. Along comes Trump and the Democrats are clutching their pearls and reaching for the smelling salts. Then in 2020 Joe Biden was installed through what many considered highly questionable means, and began implementing the far left’s wish list.
So, shockingly, right-of-center voters are infuriated at what is being done to them, and what the left openly admits they are just itching to do to them if given the chance.
To sum up, the left is going ape**it because half the country has arrived at the very logical conclusion that the jihad that has been waged against them for the last 12 years has now become not just a nuisance but a very real attempt to neuter them politically. And then they scratch their heads and go “why you so angry?”
Team sports politics. For many voters, much of who they are is wrapped up in their politics. The side they’re on is like the sports team that they’ve been a fan of for their whole life. For them, it’s really as simple as my side is good and the other side is bad. So even when their side does demonstrably horrible things and is clearly in the wrong, they’ll still believe that despite that overall their side is far better than the other side. It’s really that simple.
And it’s the same with Trump and those that support him. People get very emotional when it comes to Trump one way or another. The people who hate him seem unable to seperate the powerful emotions they have about the guy with objective reality. They truly seem to believe that Trump and his supporters are evil, racist people. It doesn’t matter that in reality that there’s no hard evidence to suggest such things (or at least nothing that hasn’t been disproven). They choose to believe that Trump is basically Hitler. It goes deep.
As you say though, how many will truly crawl over broken glass to vote against Trump versus for him is still somewhat uknowable.
I suppose they had a hard time saying Ike was Hitler. I was too young to remember. But I do know that everyone since has been. I think they went easier on Ford than any other since; he was just a retarded stumblebum. And he was a trophy of their great triumph.
Never voted until after 911 – guess that would’ve been mid-terms 2002. However, I started paying attention to elections on 11/7/2000 – whilst on the way home from a legal electrician job. We all had hung out at the shop drinking beer, so I’m guessing it was probably around 5:30 or 6:00 PM EST, in my truck when the news came on—announcing that the election was being called for Al Gore.
Huh, I thought—a conundrum. What about states in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones? Ditto on the Huh, I thought—definitely a conundrum.
So Gore had won – *NOT*!? Next day or so I had heard it was a Democratic party strategy to call elections on the East coast area to discourage Republican voters from voting. Double-Ditto on the Huh, I thought—and riddle solved.
Days later a Texas uncle called asking me what was going on in Florida!?! Told him I dunno, and I don’t vote. Al Gore conceded the election on December 13, and that was the first election I had ever paid any attention to.
Took Osama bin Laden blowing up the WTC Twin Towers before I registered to vote. DEMs & MSM were asking where GW Bush was. Insinuating that he was a coward in hiding when the American people needed him the most. ‘Where was Bush?! MSM kept asking.
Triple-Ditto on the Huh, I thought—and back to a conundrum. America had just been attacked and these morons were asking where our President was!?! Yeah, let’s let the enemy know where I president was (sarc/)!?!?! Jeez…then Bush showed up and started talking about kicking some buttocks, and I knew right then that I had to start supporting him as President. Ignorance
iswas Bliss…I believe Harry Truman called Dewey a “fascist.”
On the whole, I don’t think there’ll be much change in most states. Everything is going to come down to that handful of swing states.
Progressives were willing to vote for third party candidates in 1980 and 2000 in what turned out to be significant numbers. Will they do so this year? Or does hatred of Trump go too deep?
Kate, he did, among a whole host of Democrat Presidential candidates who have said the same about their Republican opponents. Steve Hayward at Powerline has the receipts …
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/06/how-can-you-tell-its-over-for-liberals.php
He’s written about this several times but that’s the one that Google returns now. I believe he even found a speech FDR gave during the 1944 election, when US soldiers were still dying in Europe fighting real fascists, saying Dewey had a “hint of fascism” (if I remember the quote correctly). Wish I could find that link.
https://www.nytimes.com/1948/10/26/archives/president-likens-dewey-to-hitler-as-fascists-tool-says-when-bigots.html
I had a hard time believing anyone was deranged or dumb enough to be offended by milquetoast Romney’s binders. Now there are those who seriously think that Make America Great Again is a racist dog whistle.
*sigh*
They’ll always be with us, won’t they?
There is no popular ‘NeverTrump’ strand of any consquence. There’s a population of a consistent dimension which identifies itself as ‘Republican’ but is antagonistic to the actual Republican in office; different president, different set of dissidents. What’s salient about the NeverTrump types is not their numbers but their influence. NeverTrump is a creature of Capitol Hill and K Street which have an auxilliary among mediocre opinion journalists. (See Mona Charen, the wife of a Washington BigLaw partner).
Pew gives a pretty good answer & analysis of who voted — but I don’t quite believe their analysis is unbiased, it’s certainly not thorough enough.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/
They do mention 7% higher turnout, 66% of voters voting. After every other post WW II having 60% (1960) or less, in the 58,60,59, 58 ~ish ranges.
2020 was 81 vs 74 mln votes, after 66 vs 63 mln (D v R) in 2016.
Great data site: https://uselectionatlas.org/
I believe Trump got 11 million MORE folks voting, but don’t believe Biden inspired so many real voters BUT, millions of Trump hating Dems, with mail-in ballots, were willing and able to “help” their usually non-voting neighbors to mail-in a vote for Biden. Technically as illegal as speeding — but every US driver I’ve ever been with was willing and able to Violate The Law and do speeding.
For millions of Dems, helping a few, or a few dozen, folk fill out their mail-in ballots “correctly” and just get, or forge, a signature on the envelope to send it in is about as bad as speeding.
HUGE increase in absolute numbers of voters.
Huge increase in number of fraud friendly mail-in voters — some 65 mln, 80% or so going to Biden (from memory, not Pew). Pew notes: “Nearly half of 2020 voters (46%) said they had voted by mail or absentee, and among that group, about four-in-ten said it was their first time casting a ballot this way. ”
Trump wins or loses based on mail-in votes & checking of voter signatures and eligibility, as well as legibility of their address & signed name.
Pew concludes on the education non-voting gap: “Some of the largest differences between voters and nonvoters are seen on education and income. College graduates made up 39% of all voters in 2020 (about the same as in 2016) but only 17% of nonvoters. Adults with a high school education or less were 29% of all voters but half of nonvoters.”
No EU country allows as much mail-in voting as the US in 2020. It’s a small, sad scandal that so few Republicans focus on Voter ID & fraudulent election issues; probably because they don’t want to support Trump that much.
But they should.
Great stuff you keep writing, Neo — but so depressing.
Not like kitchen remodeling, which doesn’t require gov’t approval so is much much easier than building a new house.