Regular readers of Bad Dogs and Bakeries know that on March 8, 2020, I wrote that Joe Biden would be the Democratic presidential nominee, that he would run a terrible campaign, and that he would lose the general election to Donald Trump. But it didn’t happen that way. To quote John Book: “Well, I was wrong” — at least on that last point.
Back in early March, I was confident that Donald Trump was coasting to re-election. I had written that voters don’t care about policy or competence, and that the only thing that would matter in the November general election would be turnout. I was convinced that Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, had developed a massive voter turnout machine that would send more than enough Republicans to the polls to enable Trump to beat Biden.
A lot happened between March 8 and November 3. The coronavirus pandemic exploded, was badly mishandled by President Trump and his administration, and took a terrible toll in American lives. The strong economy, about which President Trump bragged and for which he took credit, collapsed as businesses were destroyed and jobs vanished. By election day, there were 10 million fewer jobs in this country than there were on March 8. The murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers in late May sparked the largest racial justice protests in the country’s history. Daily protests spread across the country from urban Democratic strongholds to the most Trumpian rural communities. And there was that teargas and Bible-raising episode outside Saint John’s Episcopal Church across the street from Lafayette Square. Throughout those eight months, polls showed Donald Trump trailing Joe Biden by 8 percent, 12 percent, 16 percent. (But I had also written: Pay no attention to the polls.)
In spite of all this, I never changed my view. I woke up on election morning still convinced that the Republican ground game — the party’s turnout machine — would carry Trump to victory.
These two Trump presidential elections have proved to be tough to call because they’ve both been so close. In 2016, Trump was elected because he beat Hillary Clinton by a total of 77,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Out of the total of 137 million votes cast nationwide, Trump won by 0.056 percent. The 2020 election was much closer. Joe Biden won because he carried Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia by a total of 44,000 votes. Out of the 158 million votes cast in 2020, Biden won by 0.028 percent. While my prediction was much closer than that of the polls, it’s tough to call any election that turns out to be that close.
Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton in 2016, did, of course, win the popular vote. His popular vote margin was 7 million votes. But he won California by 5 million votes and New York by 2 million votes. In the other 48 states, Trump and Biden were tied in the popular-vote count.
Because of the Republican’s turnout success, Donald Trump won far more votes than any Republican or any incumbent president ever. Donald Trump is the most popular Republican in history.
In 2016, Trump won 63 million votes. In 2020, he got 11 million more votes, a total of 74 million. That’s by far the largest increase in popular votes received by any candidate who ever ran for president twice.
But think about that. After four years of the Trump presidency, after all the cruelty, corruption, misogyny, xenophobia, racism, chaos, economic collapse, and abject incompetence of the four years of the Trump presidency, not only did his 63 million voters from 2016 turn out to vote for him again, but there were 11 million more Americans who did not vote for Trump in 2016 who said to themselves: This Trump guy has been such a great president that I’m going to vote for him this time in the hope that he’ll be re-elected and lead the country for another four years. That’s 11 million people who sat out the 2016 election but who liked what they saw in Trump so much that they got out of their houses in the middle of a deadly pandemic to vote for him this time. That was the result of a hell of a ground game. And a sure sign that this is a country on its way to collapse.
Donald Trump and his 74 million voters are not going away. They’ll be around until they finish us off.
