Trump Can’t Win

With great respect for Rich and MBD, I persist in the conviction that Trump doesn’t have a prayer of being elected president again. Democrats have drawn the same conclusion, based on a lot of sensible data — Trump’s past performances (i.e., his 46 percent high-water mark, even as an incumbent, before the stop-the-steal nonsense, the Capitol riot, and the string of indictments and civil complaints), the 2018 midterms, Trump’s costing Republicans control of the Senate in 2020, and the 2022 “red wave” that never happened thanks to Trump-supported candidates.

The Democrats are trying to get Trump nominated because they know they would beat him decisively in November 2024. The indictments (and there will probably be two more — one from Biden DOJ special counsel Jack Smith, perhaps as early as today, and one from Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis (in the next two weeks or so), coupled with the civil cases teeing up for trial (New York attorney general Letitia James’s fraud case on October 3, and a second E. Jean Carroll sexual-assault/defamation case in mid January), are both firing up the Trump base and preventing other GOP candidates from getting any traction. That is the intention.

Harry Enten’s CNN polling analysis, to which Rich and MBD refer, deals mainly with the nomination battle and the patent unlikelihood that another Republican could beat Trump given his quasi-incumbent status and his commanding lead in the polls — pulling more than 50 percent and registering more support “than all his competitors combined,” as Enten tautologically puts it. This squares with the latest RCP data, which has Trump polling at 54 percent — nearly 26 points ahead of his closest rival, Ron DeSantis.

The problem for Trump is he has no upside. He is as known a quantity as has ever sought the presidency. In a normal race, the 46 percent of Republicans who do not favor Trump could be expected to “come home” in droves in the general election if he is the nominee. That is not true of Trump. As the Guardian reports, recent Pew polling indicates that just a hair under a third of Republicans now view him very or mostly unfavorably. The remaining two-thirds view him favorably, but that is down from three-quarters last year. It is reasonable to forecast that at least a quarter of Republicans will not support Trump under any circumstances. That doesn’t mean they will vote for an unpopular Democrat, they just won’t vote (or will vote third-party, write-in, or some similarly futile vehicle for registering discontent).

To have a chance in the general election, Trump has to make up that support. But from where? Polls consistently show that Democratic opposition to Trump is nearly universal. They also consistently show that his unfavorability with the general public hovers around 60 percent. There is no reason to believe this will change. To the contrary, about 54 percent of voters cast their ballots for someone other than Trump in 2016 and 2020, when he was more popular nationwide than he is now. He couldn’t win in 2020 with 46 (he won by a miracle in 2016 with 46). He is not going to win with less than 46, but there’s no reason to think he would ever sniff 46 again.

As unpopular as Biden is, recent Monmouth University polling had him beating Trump soundly even if there were a third-party “unity” ticket (the one hypothesized was Joe Manchin (D., W.V.) and Jon Huntsman (R., Utah). Maybe this is an outlier (910 registered voters), and maybe the Quinnipiac University poll discussed by CNN, showing Trump currently one point ahead of Biden in the battleground state of Pennsylvania (47–46) is more noteworthy. But I doubt it. Trump has done material damage to Republicans in the Keystone State — in 2022, he did more to get Democrats John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro elected, as senator and governor respectively, than any single political actor, and the GOP lost control of the state house for the first time in a dozen years.

I suppose my main point is that polling is a snapshot while races are dynamic. You can’t appraise Trump’s chances in the general election without assessing what is going to happen in the campaign’s final phases. The Democrats have calculated that the criminal and civil cases they are now bringing will come to hearings and trials next year. That’s when all the dramatic testimony most damaging to Trump would come out, and when the intended audience would be the general electorate, in which Trump is already deeply unpopular.

Americans broadly are not nearly as inclined as the Republican primary electorate to see Trump as a victim of Democratic persecution — even if they believe we have an increasingly corrupt two-tiered justice system. For Trump’s Republican supporters, the Capitol riot is either something to ignore (as effectively canceled out by the Black Lives Matter rioting that was far longer in duration, more lethal, and ignored by the political class) or, perversely, something to celebrate (as a rage against the machine, as a shibboleth for those who take it as an article of faith that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump). The broad mass of the country, however, finds the episode abhorrent. These ordinary Americans are not progressive Democrats — they are not obsessed by January 6. But when reminded of it, they are repulsed by it, and they will be reminded of it nonstop from September through Election Day 2024. It will go into the mix with what, by then, could very well be some felony convictions, embarrassing business-fraud evidence in a civil trial, and a second finding of civil liability in the E. Jean Carroll litigation (i.e., another powerful reminder of deep Trump character flaws — he is accused of something awful, rails publicly but is too cowardly to testify in court, then when he predictably loses, resorts to juvenile insults, thereby buying himself another lawsuit and several million more dollars in legal costs). As we get close to Election Day, moreover, the serious question of who, exactly, would serve in a new Trump administration will become much more of a first-order concern than it is now.

You want to tell me Biden has his problems, too? I’ve spent a lot of my time writing about them, so I get that. But Biden’s party will defend him to the hilt and cares a lot more about retaining the presidency than his character — or lack thereof. I think chances are better than even that he won’t be the nominee anyway; but whether he is or not, the Democrats — unlike the Republicans — are not going to have a quarter of their base refuse to support the nominee. They have campaign consultants who are shrewd enough to paint Biden (or fill-in-the-blank Democrat) as a well-meaning, likable moderate who believes in our institutions and the promise of America, and most of all isn’t Trump, in the critical few months before the election, when most Americans who don’t care about politics tune in.

I’ll close with what I’ve been saying for a couple of years now. The Democrats’ plan has been, at this point (with 2024 voting a little over a year away), to give Republicans the impression that Trump can win. And it’s working. We’ve all seen with our own eyes how Trump has destroyed the GOP’s grip on Pennsylvania over six years, and yet people are somehow going up in a balloon about his chances to beat Biden in the state because a poll shows him in a statistical dead heat there. That is what Democrats and the media want us to think. Then we nominate him and he loses in a landslide in November, taking the Senate and House down with him.

For Republicans to win in 2024, they can’t get mesmerized by today’s polling, which reflects understandable voter angst against Biden. You have to assess what the chessboard is going to look like a year from now. If Trump is the nominee, it will look like an onslaught that we are not adequately envisioning now — though that is much more worth the effort than drawing conclusions from current polling. I simply don’t see how Trump gets to 42 percent of the electorate. The country has already made up its mind about him. From here, there’s no up, only down. If we nominate him, he’s going to get drubbed.