"I surprised them." - Donald Trump speaking about the 2016 presidential election that Democrats thought they were going to win right up to Hillary Clinton's cancellation of the planned fireworks display over the Hudson River the night before the election.
Democrats vowed to never again be surprised by Trump & in the 2024 Trump-Biden rematch each party thought they had the one opponent they could beat. Nikki Haley astutely pointed out that the first party to drop their aging candidate would win.
When the Democrats started getting cold feet about Biden's cognitive capacity & falling poll numbers they sucker punched Trump into agreeing to a June 27 debate - over three months earlier than the usual first debate. Biden did so miserably in the debate that he dropped out of the presidential race but has been able to continue with what must be the less important job of actually being president. Just imagine the state of the race if Trump had not agreed to that debate - it would still be the Trump-Biden rematch with Biden's incapacity suspected but not admitted. But Harris has quickly regained Biden's lost polling ground & in many polls it is now Trump who trails & slides a little more each day.
Trump won the 2016 presidential race 304 to 227 electoral votes. He received 46.5% of the popular vote. Three states provided the margin of victory: Wisconsin - 10 electoral votes by a 22,748 vote margin out of 3 million votes cast; Michigan - 16 electoral votes by a 10,704 vote margin out of 4.8 million votes cast; & Pennsylvania - 20 electoral votes by a 44,292 vote margin out of 6.2 million votes cast. If Hillary had overcome this cumulative 77,744 vote deficit she would have won the presidency 273 electoral votes to 258 - there were seven faithless electors.
In 2020 Biden won the presidency by an almost identical electoral college margin 306 to 232 with three states providing an even closer margin of victory: Wisconsin - 10 electoral votes by a 20,608 vote margin out of 3.3 million votes cast; Arizona - 11 electoral votes by a 10,457 vote margin out of 3.4 million votes cast; Georgia - 16 electoral votes by an 11,779 vote margin out of five million votes cast. RTE posts since the 2020 election have shown how Trump suffered this 42,844 cumulative vote deficit - for example, Trump received less votes than winning congressmen down ballot in many cases with the difference totaling more votes than Trump lost the state by. If Trump had overcome these three infinitesimal deficits in 2020 the race would have been tied 269 electoral votes each. Students of the Constitution know what would have happened to Trump & Biden as well as Pence & Harris.
A good indicator I go by in analyzing a presidential election is to subtract the California & New York totals from the national popular vote. In 2016 Trump won the popular vote of the total of the other 48 states by over three million votes while in 2020 Trump still won by this metric but by only 44,590 votes so there definitely was a stronger anti-Trump movement in 2020 in the other 48 states.
In addition to Nikki's remarks about each party changing out old candidates, after the June 27 debate Nikki also recommended that Republicans prepare for the Democrats replacing Biden with a "younger" & more "vibrant" candidate which of course is exactly what happened on July 21 - right on cue three days after the Republican National Convention concluded to minimize the news coverage positive bounce coming out of the convention. Quite clever timing.
Neither Trump nor Vance has handled the switcheroo well from the inept Biden to a black woman whose strongest issue is abortion rights.
Abortion is the issue that gets credit for thwarting the 2022 Republican midterm red wave congressional victory. The November 2022 midterm election was held less than five months after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had made abortion legal throughout the U.S. Trump bragged about appointing three justices with known anti abortion views but now backs away from this fact.
Previous posts have pointed out how Trump stumbles regarding abortion. Trump's June 27 debate statement that everyone wanted Roe v. Wade overturned with abortion policy returned to the states is delusional. No one seeking an abortion wanted Roe overturned, meaning they would have to travel out of their home state to get an abortion let alone wanted its legality decided by 50 different state government officials. Unbelievably Trump repeated this ridiculous claim virtually verbatim @ the September 10 debate with Harris.
The Florida citizen-led ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution by explicitly blocking the implementation of laws that "prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability" has found Trump more than once on every side of the ballot initiative. Since he is a resident of Florida Trump is being pressured to say how he will vote on the measure that will undo the six week abortion ban signed into law on May 1. Trump originally criticized that law as "a terrible mistake," a thinly veiled attack of Ron DeSantis, but now says he is voting in its favor. In an ultimate irony, if the initiative passes, abortion in Florida, after the Roe overturn, will have gone from a 15 week ban to a six week ban to a 22 - 26 week ban meaning a longer period to get an abortion than even before the six week ban was signed into law. The ballot initiative needs 60% of the vote to pass.
More trouble for Trump & down ballot races - there are nine other states (Arizona, Nevada, Montana, South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, New York, & Maryland) that have abortion measures on the ballot in the 2024 election cycle.
But Trump's pandering position on in vitro fertilization (IVF) as told to Tulsi Gabbard in Wisconsin the last week of August is the most pathetic: "The government is going to pay for it or we're going to mandate your insurance company to pay for it." Republicans campaigned for years to overturn ObamaCare because, among other things, it forced insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. Does this make Trump the ultimate RINO? Also, does this seemingly desperate position take into account that the average IVF cycle in 2023 cost $12,400 - not counting medications & testing? With fertility medications & genetic testing the cost could range between $15,000 to $30,000 per cycle. Source GoodRx.
Based on the above, abortion has all the potential in the world to once again work against Trump & Republicans up & down the ballot.
The handling of Covid was an issue that hurt Republicans in 2020 so Harris has made it the basis of her answer regarding why the economy & inflation have been constant problems for people under Biden/Harris. Harris claimed during their September 10 debate that Trump handed Biden/Harris such a bad economy - including "the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, the worst public health epidemic in a century, & the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War - that "what we (Biden/Harris) have done is clean up Donald Trump's mess" @ least implying that it has taken this long to do so.
The following graphic shows that 50% of voters in 2020 understandably rated health concerns (41% Covid & 9% healthcare) as the most important issue in the 2020 presidential election - & Trump was on the defensive for most of 2020 regarding one aspect of Covid or another as described below.
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Right out of the box, in March & April 2020 Trump regularly disrupted the daily Covid TV briefings-updates by getting into arguments with members of the press over minutia while vulnerable senior citizens, who were interested in the updates as a matter of life & death, only saw non-productive sparring matches day after day. The Covid TV briefings were supposed to be handled by Pence, & Drs. Fauci & Birx. Trump did himself no favors the way he appeared in these briefings.
Congress started throwing money @ developing a Covid vaccine in March 2020 & by May 2020 Trump ordered the drug companies to produce a Covid-19 vaccine in rapid fire order under Operation Warp Speed (OWS) - the goal was to deliver 300 million doses of a safe, effective, vaccine for Covid-19 by January, 2021. A typical vaccine takes 5 to 10 years to develop. The FDA approved the Covid-19 vaccines under emergency use authorization. My doctor told me it was an experimental approval. Nevertheless, many employers including the United States government mandated that employees get vaccinated thereby causing more division throughout the country.
Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases, provided the perfect example of what the administrative state produces to solve problems. Fauci was wrong more than he was right with orders to wear masks & then not wear masks &/or to stand six feet apart before saying this is not important. Fauci takes no responsibility for the shutdowns of either businesses &/or schools that occurred during Covid's worst time saying he did not have the authority to lock down anything - but while he was the top medical authority real GDP fell $2 trillion taking 15 months to recover (see graphic below) & PCE consumer spending declined $2.6 trillion taking eleven months to recover. Seems Fauci forgot the federal government's leadership in "flattening the curve" to buy time so that healthcare facilities were not overwhelmed with patients.
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With all of his wrong information no one, starting with Trump, ever suggested Fauci step down or be fired. On the contrary, @ his salary, well into his eighties, he was the highest paid federal government employee during Covid's worse times & like Joe & Jill Biden had to be dragged off the job.
And all the while Congress was passing & Trump was signing into law $3.6 trillion of Covid welfare stimulus money that is the root cause of our 40 year high inflation problem that included direct cash payments to households ($1,200 per adult plus $500 per qualifying child under 17), an additional $600 per week in unemployment compensation plus increases in food assistance, tax credits for employers who offered paid sick leave, bailouts & loans for airlines & other industries, & loans & grants for small businesses. In addition to the Covid stimulus money Trump signed a $1.4 trillion omnibus bill to fund the government. All in all Trump is the biggest one term deficit spender in the country's history.
But Covid is different from abortion because Covid has culpability for both Trump & Harris while the two candidates could not be more different regarding abortion - Harris is full throated for it & Trump doesn't know what to do with it.
Harris bases many parts of her campaign on the premise that Trump left Biden/Harris a mess while acknowledging that the Covid-19 pandemic caused by the Wuhan coronavirus was partially to blame. She also thinks Trump handled Covid poorly. The truth is that more people died per unit of time under Biden/Harris than under Trump. See graphic below & notice the steeper slope of the line under Biden/Harris from 400,000 deaths to the first million Covid-19 deaths in America than the slope of the line under Trump's term from March 1, 2020 to January 20, 2021. And yet Harris got away with this distortion in the September 10 debate because Trump just can't focus on anything other than his blather.
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How much sharper would Trump have been in the September 10 debate if he had participated in the Republican primary debates with Pence, Haley, & Christy - three people who had worked for Trump & would have added great insight into the dialogue. But Trump only wanted to debate the hapless Biden ("anywhere, any time, any place") & as of this moment wants no parts of a second debate with Harris who masterfully baited him time after time.
Harris was extremely well coached & prepared for the September 10 debate. She responded to the questions each time exactly as she wanted to, telling just what she wanted, leaving out what she didn't want to bring up, but always ending her allotted time with a dig to stir Trump up like saying people leave Trump's rallies early out of boredom, the Wharton school scores Trump's economic plan poorly, or that Trump inherited millions of dollars to start his business. In a failing junior high school type debate performance Trump was so distracted by Harris's maneuver that he never got around to pointing out the weakness of her response to the issue raised in the original question. Trump could not resist talking about his crowd sizes or professors @ Wharton who he claimed think highly of his terrible tariff plans leaving Harris to smilingly go on to the next question only to repeat this mouse trap plan again & again.
Will any of this make a difference for the voters who are undecided? Who knows what to think about an electorate who has given us this terrible choice for president?
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