Republicans are set to take the bait and nominate Trump, convinced that he can beat Biden even though he can’t.
Republicans are set to take the bait and nominate Trump, convinced that he can beat Biden even though he can’t.
I t is frustrating to watch a slow-motion train wreck. But I’ve repeatedly predicted that the media-Democratic complex would, over the next months, project a Trump 2024 victory, intentionally prompting irrational exuberance in the Trump base and rendering it practically impossible for an electable Republican candidate to emerge. It’s hard not to be depressed, then, watching the GOP execute the game plan exactly as the Democrats drew it up.
Former president Trump has a nine-point lead over President Joe Biden in a recent Washington Post/ABC poll! Yeah, right. So skewed in Trump’s favor is this survey, it’s hilarious — at least until it dawns on you that this nonsense was put out by reliable media-Democratic-complex organs, in the undoubted calculation that Republicans would crow, “See? Trump must be the nominee!” As night follows day, Republicans have fallen for it — as if we inhabit a world where it is fathomable that the deeply unpopular Trump has a nearly double-digit lead over the incumbent president. What could get it to 20 points? Another Capitol riot?
Even the pollsters themselves can’t keep a straight face on this one. ABC dryly observes that any apparent shift in Trump’s direction is “not statistically significant” when one factors in the margin of error as well as the polling outfit’s flawed February and May polls, which had Trump up 48–44 and 49–42, respectively. Translation: If the saps bought those, why wouldn’t they buy this one?
Here is the reality: For the moment, the two-horse race is as close as it is meaningless. “Meaningless” because these polls measure something that is saliently different from the ultimate contest that they purport to forecast. The polls are a snapshot of how, at a moment in time, the candidates fare against each other nationally. Yet the election, which is still 13 months away, will not be national; there will be 50 state elections. If Trump, say, wins Texas by eight points, that won’t make an iota’s difference in Pennsylvania, Georgia, or Wisconsin. That’s why, in a bottom-line sense, it no more matters that Trump may have a slight national polling lead at the moment (and count me skeptical on that) than it did that Hillary Clinton, in her 2016 defeat, got 3 million more votes than Trump, or that Biden, in his 2020 victory, got 7 million more votes than Trump.
Presidential elections are decided not by a cumulative tally of votes but by Electoral College math. More than 150 million Americans will vote in 2024, but the election will be decided by the splits in a handful of battleground states. In the last two cycles, these have been close, with tight elections decided by somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000 votes. But the race won’t be that close in 2024 if the nominee is Trump, the Democrats’ dream candidate, who has spent the last eight years making the battleground states progressively bluer.
The recent neck-and-neck Trump/Biden polls should surprise no one. It has been crystal clear for a couple of years that, because Democrats desperately want Trump to be the Republican nominee, they would do whatever they could, at this stage of the race, to make it look like he could win the general election.
Ta-da!
This is the critical juncture at which Republicans are deciding on their nominee. If Trump looked weak, GOP support could surge for a candidate Democrats fear would be more formidable. Elected Democratic prosecutors and the Biden Justice Department thus began indicting Trump, shrewdly swaddling him in the mantle of political-vendetta victim.
As Democrats had surmised, this galvanized Trump’s base and even drew sympathy from other Republicans — those many who, though not big Trump fans, are not Never Trump, either. Those Republicans, it turns out, are more incensed by the Democrats’ intentionally provocative weaponization of prosecutorial power than they are fond of Trump’s GOP competitors. This diminished those competitors’ already atrophied instinct to take the race to Trump (at least the competitors who might have had a chance). When Democrats saw how well indicting Trump worked, they indicted him again . . . and again . . . and again.
When not indicting him in criminal court, they sued him in civil court. This week, in fact, Judge Arthur Engoron — an elected Democratic hack in Manhattan — imposed the corporate death penalty on Trump’s New York real-estate empire based on the civil-fraud lawsuit brought by Attorney General Letitia James, who had campaigned on a vow to use the power of the office against the Democrats’ archnemesis. Even Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who has indicted Trump on a ludicrous falsifying-business-records charge, did not believe James’s fraud evidence merited criminal prosecution, given that Trump’s creditors are sophisticated financial actors who were neither fooled nor harmed by his exaggeration of asset values. But James convinced her fellow Democrat, Engoron, to issue a scathing partial-summary-judgment ruling that puts Trump, his two adult sons, and their multibillion-dollar conglomerate out of business — the business the Trump family had run from the Empire State for decades.
No matter how you feel about Trump, this is patently draconian and political. It is authoritarian progressive make-the-process-the-penalty hardball that gets normal people incensed. Every time something like this happens — and it’s been constant for a year — Trump’s lead in the GOP nomination contest grows, to the point where it’s not really a contest right now.
Ergo, Trump has no incentive to debate or do anything that might give his competitors some sunshine. And even though they can’t win without taking him on, they’re too paralyzed by fear of his base to do so — to the point that, at Wednesday night’s cacophonous debate, the Lilliputians figured it was better to bicker about each other than notice that the absent Gulliver had just suggested in a Truth Social post that General Mark Milley, whom Trump himself had appointed Joint Chiefs chairman, merited the “DEATH!!” penalty over back-channel discussions with Chinese commanders toward the chaotic end of Trump’s term. Little wonder the base is tuning out the B-Team. (Have a look at the transcript: The name “Trump” was uttered 21 times during the debate, but it would barely have been mentioned at all had it not been for the moderators and Chris Christie — whose stance as the anti-Trump candidate has gotten him to a whopping 3 percent compared with Trump’s 63 percent in polling of today’s GOP.)
Some of my colleagues look at polls showing that a Biden–Trump rematch looks tight and conclude that the Democrats’ indictment strategy has not been as effective as they’d hoped. With all due respect, if you’re starting to say, “You know, maybe he really can win,” that’s proof that the indictment strategy has worked to perfection.
The Democrats don’t need Biden to beat Trump today. For today, they just need Trump to beat Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, et al. The indictments have helped make that appear inevitable — in fact, it may now be inevitable since Republicans show no sign of snapping out of their “He’s nine points ahead of Biden” trance. Not until this time next year will Democrats need to beat Trump. And man-oh-man are they ever loading up the arsenal for that.
Let’s look at some other polls, courtesy of RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight. Trump is slightly behind Biden in one new poll (Biden up 43–42 in a Morning Consult poll), slightly ahead of Biden in another (Trump up 46–41 in a The Messenger/HarrisX poll), and tied in a few others (NBC News recently had it 46–46; last week Emerson had it knotted at 45, and Yahoo at 44).
If we toss out the absurd Washington Post/ABC poll — the only one that has ever had Trump over 50 percent and significantly ahead of Biden — what we find is that Trump is where he has always been: unable to get to 47 percent. That’s where he was in 2016, when he miraculously won; and that’s where he was in 2020, when he lost — as one would expect someone who gets 46 percent in a two-candidate race to do, even when the Electoral College mitigates the impact of losing California and New York by a combined millions of votes.
Trump remains intensely unpopular nationally, regardless of the devotion of his base that has outsized impact on the GOP nomination contest. His unfavorability rating hovers around 56 percent, with his favorable at stuck at 41, and those numbers have been steady since he left office. And no, it makes no sense to dismiss the Washington Post/ABC poll as the joke it is but simultaneously speculate that it might signal that a positive reappraisal of Trump’s presidency is taking hold.
I don’t believe Trump’s numbers are going to stay flat. They are going to dip by more than three points, maybe much more, by this time next year. That is when Democrats and the media will have begun throwing at him everything they have — everything they have been saving up, and everything they are continuing to accumulate, including the insane Truth Social posts. Few people are paying attention to those at the moment because, even with Trump, Truth Social is a tiny platform. (When Trump got his mug shot in the Georgia case, he posted it on Twitter/X — his first tweet in over two years — because he wanted people to see it.)
Right now, Democrats are holding their fire because they want Trump to be nominated. Once that’s in the bag, however, the onslaught will begin, exacerbated by evidence that will become fully public in one or more criminal trials. By this time next year, Trump may be convicted of one or more felonies. (I may not like Jack Smith’s January 6 case, but I sure like his chances with a Washington, D.C., jury and Judge Tanya Chutkan presiding.) Critically, when this all falls into place, the Democrats’ target audience will no longer be GOP primary voters; it will be the general public that is already decisively predisposed against Trump.
To repeat what I’ve said before, the current polling and the giddy spin on it are meant to deceive us. When crunch time comes, the former president’s numbers are going nowhere but down. That is to say, Trump can’t win. Every time Republicans and conservatives — either out of delusion or dread — say he can win, it’s like a self-fulfilling prophesy that renders it closer to impossible that an electable Republican can be nominated.
To my mind, the one noteworthy thing about the polls is the large number of undecided voters — between 8 and 15 percent of the electorate. That brings us to what’s dynamic in the race: Biden, not Trump. The incumbent president’s favorability ratings have cratered, from 54 percent at the start of his term to 41 percent now. With a commensurate shift in his unfavorability (now up to about 55, compared with 31 when he was sworn in), Biden is now nearly as underwater as Trump.
Here is the difference: Biden could readily regain some ground. Not a lot, but some.
To be sure, the president is never again going to be net popular. (Biden has been a notorious clown for half a century; what made him popular in January 2021 was that he wasn’t Trump.) And yes, things could get worse for him. Biden’s self-made border crisis is intensifying, just as more big blue cities have realized they weren’t serious about being “sanctuaries,” after all. The president has never recovered from his Afghanistan-withdrawal debacle. As the brutal stalemate in Eastern Europe continues, Americans are reminded of how Putin was emboldened by both that debacle and Biden’s jaw-dropping observation that the West was unlikely to do much if Russia conducted a “minor incursion” into Ukraine. Meanwhile, inflation will remain sticky and Biden’s impossible-not-to-notice impairments are worsening. It’s also foreseeable that a long-predicted recession could finally happen, and — as ever — that some war or other crisis we haven’t anticipated could arise.
Then there is the scandal that has led to the House impeachment inquiry, which held its first hearing this week. The proof of Biden-family influence-peddling is getting worse ($24 million raked in from 2014 to 2019 from agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes), and so is the evidence that the Biden Justice Department willfully steered the investigation away from Joe Biden. Hunter Biden has been indicted on gun offenses, and he is now likely to be indicted on tax offenses.
All that said, though, Republicans lacked the votes to approve the impeachment inquiry (which is why Speaker Kevin McCarthy unilaterally authorized it). That is a strong sign that there will never be enough votes to file articles of impeachment. The investigation will plod along for months, which is what Trump allies want: a Biden-corruption investigation in parallel with Trump’s criminal proceedings. But Biden, nevertheless, is set up to claim vindication, there appearing to be little chance of a House impeachment and zero chance of conviction and removal in the Senate.
Biden has two political lifelines. The first is Trump’s lightning-rod effect. The former president is a charismatic, bigger-than-life figure who inspires adoration and abhorrence — not much in between and, unfortunately for him, more of the latter than the former. Trump doesn’t have “unfavorable” ratings like quotidian politicians; he has “loathe him with every ounce of my being” ratings. If you’re writing those voters down as a “maybe” come Election Day, you’re dreaming.
Biden’s second advantage, ironically, is his own smallness. It’s not just that Biden isn’t Trump; he also isn’t Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. He doesn’t excite anyone’s passions, anyone’s intense disapproval, other than the passions and disapproval of conservative political obsessives like us. Americans elected him because the combination of Trump and Covid left them annoyed and exhausted. They don’t much like him, but they don’t much dislike him, either, let alone hate him. We who live and breathe politics and policy discern that Biden has let the woke progressives run rampant; but the public simply doesn’t see him as one of the crazies. Americans who don’t pay much attention to politics (the sizeable majority of Americans) no doubt wish their president was younger and dynamic. Nevertheless, Biden’s staff and the media do a good job of keeping him mostly out of sight and, as presidents go, out of the news — after all, there’s so much Trump news to talk about!
Which is to say, despite all his considerable problems, Biden not only could tick up a bit in the polls, he almost surely will tick up when the media-Democratic complex unleashes its real barrage against Trump a few months from now. The president could beat the former president again just by holding steady because Trump is going to drop. And as for those undecideds? Some of them will hold their noses and vote Biden, some will stay home, but they will not go to Trump. No one in the United States is undecided about Trump. He is probably the most known quantity in American political history.
A number of Republican candidates could beat Biden. Unfortunately, they show no signs of being able to beat Trump in the increasingly small place that, for now, is Trump’s party. But just as Twitter is not real life, the Trump base is not the real America it imagines itself to be. If Republicans nominate Donald Trump, they are guaranteeing four more years of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, with the latter quite probably succeeding the former at some point.
Not to worry, though. Surely Trump can beat Harris in 2028, right?