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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.