Archive
The Fundamentals Were Never with Trump
Oh, hey, it’s Matt. So, it’s been kind of a while since I wrote here (like a long while). I apologize, but I have been doing stuff on the sidelines like the WTM ratings with Brian. As the end of the 2024 Cycle is fast upon us, let’s explore what I think is the most and yet least controversial take one could have at the end of a cacophony of punditry and pontifications across the political spectrum (we at Within the Margin, withstanding): that the fundamentals of this race never favored Trump. Whether you start the clock on the evening of January 6th, 2021, or the dreaded afternoon of June 24th, 2022, the bell tolled for Donald Trump’s chances of winning. It is through the sort of manufactured luck that typically gets you thrown out of profitable casinos that this character kept drawing inside straight after inside straight to “luck” his way to the final table. We can only hope that this table spells the end of him and the beginning of the end of the vile ideology that will still need to be electorally exterminated over who knows how long.
Now, let me state unequivocally that Trump’s re-nomination was never in doubt. From January 6th to his official clinching earlier this year, Trump was never truly challenged for the party’s apparatus. Ronna McDaniel remained as HIS RNC Chair (until she conveniently wasn’t); his word carried weight in State Party Committee selections and the overall composition of the RNC. It’s effortless to ice out everyone when you control the infrastructure. As much as the Ron DeSantises or Nikki Haleys of the world thought there were ashes out of which to rise, they were never seriously going to challenge for the “crown.” From his announcement, the nomination was his.
It is easy to argue that prior to President Biden’s exit from the race, everything favored Trump. On the Economy, and with the double-haters likely favoring the challenger, this would be superficially true. On the economics question, there’s a lot to unpack given the overall tax cuts from 2017 and their long term effects, the effects of the pandemic, and the long recovery from it in terms of general affordability. The economy is still something of a pain point, but one side declaring a tariff through extralegal if necessary means is sort of self-disqualifying. There was also a burst-through on immigration (a position purposely poisoned for the SOLE purpose of the election, most egregiously by Donald Trump but with huge assistance from Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis) as well. But let’s pull the lens back from the simple narrative of an unpopular incumbent in trouble due to the economy.
Fundamentally, Donald Trump wasn’t running a political campaign. He was using the RNC and his campaign as a slush fund vehicle to underwrite his legal issues. Across every case, he was utilizing the campaign and the RNC to fund his legal expenses. They were not building out campaign infrastructure. They weren’t focusing on voter persuasion and active voter mobilization and registration. Now, it can be argued that these were being taken on by other groups and therefore not a need for the RNC and the Trump campaign…but that’s not a guarantee. Look no further than the “GOTV” of Elon Musk’s America PAC. Prior to America PAC’s actions, the RNC had Turning Point USA running their Field operation and doing… what, exactly?They were not dedicating time in the states that were going to be the tipping point or that sat a knife’s edge. At no point were these vehicles benefitting the campaign. Finally, the registration efforts…we’ll see how effective they were. In the end, there was no effort to run a campaign in the traditional sense; tons of money came into the Trump coffers, and the RNC, but most of it went right back out.
Next, Trump never addressed the elephant he happened to drop into a room by way of the Dobbs Decision. It is certainly my hope that June 24th of 2022 will mark the beginning of the end for the era of Trumpism and that while beating him at the ballot box one last time may be sweet, the ideas and ideals fester. Dobbs was the bomb that changed the supposed “Red Wave” of the 2022 midterms. It kept Democrats in play to keep the majority in the Senate and to only lost the House by a handful instead of 20 seats. Dobbs created that. It’s impossible to say if Dobbs was the major contributor to the first special election after it came down (the Nebraska 1st on June 28th of 2022), but it possibly played a role there and definitely played a role in a number of other special elections and the 2022 general elections. Dobbs led to successful efforts to save reproductive rights in Kansas and Ohio – you know, bastions of liberalism, both – and other states. When asked, all Trump ever answered was, “I did the thing – I gave it back to the states and everyone loves me for it, I don’t know why Kansas and Ohio did what they did, but they did and what of it.” His running mate gave an attempted gaslighting in his debate with the framing that “yes, the GOP hadn’t had answers on Dobbs and its immediate aftereffects, but trust us, we’ll get it right.” Of course, not helping anything in that reframing was the fact the former President stated unequivocally at the one debate he chose to do with Vice President Harris that “I don’t talk to my selection for Vice President.” From that point the VP selection was rendered null and void in this writer’s eyes. Dobbs changed the midterms but remains the biggest known-unkown of the cycle. As of writing, women make up more than half of the early voting electorate. Now, is this indicative of a blow out? No. But it’s more of an underlying factor that was its own self-persuasion event and we still don’t know its total impact. That might be a little word salad-y, but in short: Dobbs changed a lot of things and discounting its effect is to the detriment of those who do so.
The former president never had to address anything of significant import in his third attempt at running for the Presidency. The supposed air of inevitability that he spun up after the midterms helped him glide through the primaries completely unchallenged, to the point that he never took a debate stage to answer for anything in front of GOP voters. Primary debates, even those that otherwise seem useless, still help frontrunners in campaigns and expose frontrunners who don’t have what it takes to win. Trump avoiding the primary debates was brilliant in terms of maintaining his aura of invincibility, but would have led to an actual campaign at a time he wasn’t using campaign money. Beyond the primaries he never let an infrastructure be built to fight anything resembling a close race. The plan for the third attempt was the same as the plans for the first and second in that sheer cult of personality and force of will would prevail. The adage “if it ain’t broke don’t fix i,” is true – however, there were actually some serious “breaks” that were pushed aside as unimportant. There were no investments of time or money to answer the most critical problems of a third Trump run: any help in building a voter contact network of any value and never being able to provide a substantive answer to what’s after Dobbs. Despite that lack of investment, yes, this race has (and was) too close to call. But the fact remains that Trump was never fundamentally favored. Why? Sheer dumb luck and cowardice.
In terms of sheer dumb luck: the President got gifts from his primary opponents generally being incompetent; and he ran the table inavoiding consequences in his various trials. Of those challengers only Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy had any semblance of a plan for a campaign, and Haley was the only one who had an actual theory of a case. Ramaswamy made himself a mercenary at Trump’s disposal to take on and take out any opponent that could pose any threat to Trump. At the debates his aim was mostly at Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. Why?ell, they presented somewhat credible threats to Trump. Ramaswamy used his time to take shots on behalf of Trump and was doing so in order to gain some sort of favor after his exit (though it’s debatable what he’ll get as a prize.) Haley was the sole credible challenger, and presented an actual Theory of a case and became THE outlet for Republican dissatisfaction of Trump in the primaries. It wasn’t enough to displace Trump as the nominee (and this would be a much worse race for Democrats had she prevailed), but it’s not unnoticed that the theory she presented as a need for a new generation in leadership was heard by the Democrats and manifested in the change in candidate from Biden to Harris. Trump could hold this theory in a Republican Primary, especially in a primary he effectively wrote the rules for by controlling the RNC. And it wasn’t a concern before Harris – but it should have been givenurther thought after Harris became the nominee for the Democratic Party. Now, the trials were generally dumb luck, especially in Georgia. There’s no other way to put it.
Onto cowardice: Donald Trump benefited from the lack of serious questioning in a primary setting, and from the Press ever since he first announced. Press outlets fear Trump for justifiable reasons (shooting at local papers), but they laid down time and time again. At the outset, it was for ratings and the spectacle of his rallies. Later, it was gaslit into “equal time” and equivocation, especially from the print media, as at the end of this campaign cycle we saw a number of high-profile papers reject the recommendation of their editorial boards and endorse Harris out of fear of retribution had Trump lost. It was always cowardly. Trump benefited from cowardice like no previous presidential aspirant in history.
In total, Trump never had the fundamentals of a campaign, and he never had the fundamentals for a changed race in August. Since that time, none of the fundamentals we think of for a presidential race favored Trump. He skated by on his own hubris and that of his campaign, and on the lack of courage to call him out. Trump ran a bad race in total. The extreme polarization in the electorate is the only reason it ended as close as it did.
State of Play: New Hampshire
[note: due to my own buffoonery, I’ve had this one done for a while but forgot to schedule it. So it’s publishing out of order. Obviously, it was supposed to go between South Carolina and Virginia.]
This is the second state in our series that looms large in presidential primary contests – but unlike South Carolina, it has also spent time recently as a swing state. It’s worth remembering that for all the talk of Florida in 2000, Gore would have carried New Hampshire that year if a third of Nader’s voters opted for him instead, and its four electoral votes would have given him 271 and the presidency.
2004 marked something of a turning point. New Hampshire was the only state that swung from Gore to Kerry, beginning a streak of five Democratic wins in a row here. John Lynch won the first of four two-year terms as governor that year – the only Dem in the state’s history to do so. Democrats flipped one of the Senate seats in 2008 and the other in 2016. The two Congressional seats went back and forth for a few cycles before settling into a Democratic groove. Both houses of the state legislature are GOP-held but narrowly; the executive council remains swingy.
Click to continue reading.State of Play: New York
There’s always some risk in stepping back and analyzing elections in your own backyard. It’s more personal, so you’re at greater risk of seeing what you want to see. You might offend people you actually know who’s involved locally, or you might do your readers a disservice by refraining from an observation so as to avoid doing so. And let’s face it: New York Democrats are in a sensitive place these days. The 2022 statewide elections were much closer than they’ve been accustomed to, and things went poorly downballot. 2023 brought something of a rebound in local elections – particularly in the Hudson Valley. But ongoing questions remain about Democratic erosion with non-white voters, as well as the state party’s ability to adapt to a changing political landscape. With half a dozen truly competitive Congressional races here, the stakes are high for the party. Less so for Within the Margin, but we still like to get things right – whether it’s our backyard or across the country.
Click to continue reading.State of Play: Virginia
Virginia came out of the gates fast, winning eight of the country’s first nine presidential terms and adding another not long after when John Tyler succeeded William Henry Harrison’s short-lived presidency. In more recent times, Virginia’s national influence has more to do with serving as the base of operations for countless federal agencies, campaign headquarters, think tanks…and stately homes-away-from-home for many Congressmembers, especially those inclined to spent more and more of their time in the D.C. area as their seniority grows and their desire to journey back to their homes and districts wanes. Or in the case of a Josh Hawley, sometimes that desire wanes immediately, before they have any seniority whatsoever.
It also serves the function of providing political pundits something to obsess over in the first odd-numbered year following each presidential election, as one of the only two states to elect its governor on that cycle. Most years it elects a governor from the party opposite to the most recent presidential winner, allowing for dire warnings that the incumbent president has “over-reached” or “lost touch” and “faces headwinds ahead of the upcoming midterms.” The pattern commenced in the mid-70s: Democrat Jimmy Carter had won the presidency in ’76, and Republican John Dalton was elected governor in ’77. Since then, the only exception has been 2013 when Terry McAuliffe won the governorship a year after his co-partisan Barack Obama was re-elected president. It’s true enough that almost all presidents “face headwinds” by that point in their term, but that also means it says more about the fickleness of American political preferences. That’s particularly true in an era of negative partisanship.
Click to continue reading.State of Play: South Carolina
South Carolina and its political class have taken lead roles in American upheavals. John C. Calhoun pivoted dramatically from nationalist support for a strong federal government to supporting nullification and states’ rights (specifically the right to preserve slavery) and became a massive influence on those who would ultimately secede from the union a little under a decade after his death – beginning, of course, with South Carolina. The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln became virtually criminalized in the decades following the Civil War, giving rise to the “Solid South” for Democrats. That began to crumble in 1948, when segregationists led by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond1 abandoned the Democratic Party after its adoption of a civil rights plank at the national convention.
Click to continue reading.State of Play: Maryland
Mountains, bays, ocean beaches, a major city, two major metro areas, farmland, suburbs: Maryland fits a diverse landscape into its acreage, the ninth-smallest among the 50 states. There’s not as much political diversity, as Democrats dominate the Old Line State. The counties west of Frederick, stretching into the Allegheny Mountains, are rock-ribbed Republican, and the GOP does well in much of the Eastern Shore and a pair of exurban/rural counties (Harford and Cecil) northeast of the city of Baltimore. But the blue strongholds are numerous: the city of Baltimore (87% for Biden); the much more populous, suburban Baltimore County (strongly Republican in the latter decades of the 20th century, but 62% for Biden); affluent Montgomery County – the largest in the state with all its federal employees (79% Biden); fast-growing Prince George’s County (second-largest in the state, majority-Black, 89% for Biden). There’s also Howard County, another affluent and fast-growing county, east of Montgomery but increasingly oriented toward Washington, D.C. It gave Biden 71% in 2020. Anne Arundel County, home to the Naval Academy’s Annapolis where the Severn River flows into Chesapeake Bay, was once a Republican stronghold. But in 2016, it voted for its first Democratic presidential nominee since Lyndon Johnson in ’64 and gave Biden nearly 56% four years later.
Click to continue reading.State of Play: Massachusetts
1920, 1924, 1960 (both parties!), 1972, 1988, 2004, 2012: the last century was replete with Massachusetts natives and officeholders on major party tickets….even if the last one, Mitt Romney, spent a lot of time reassuring his party’s right flank that his days as a moderate New Englander were nothing to worry about. The state carried tremendous political weight in the country’s earliest days, of course, but its combination of commercial heft and professional politics contested between mostly-Protestant Yankee Republicans and mostly-Catholic Democrats of immigrant stock meant that it produced quite a few candidates on the national stage well beyond the days when it when it was a top-ten state in population, as it was through the 1970 Census. There’s not much in the way of competitive races to talk about there this cycle, but that in fact tells its own story: in an era where political divides along educational lines are taking on ever-greater prominence, Massachusetts is not only a highly-educated state but one where its plethora of colleges means that more people work in higher ed here than do in many states with larger populations. It’s not shocking, then, that the state rejected Trump even more harshly in 2020 than it had in 2016: the realignment along these lines is strong and Massachusetts does not have a factor that would offset it, like a high rate of religious adherence.
Click here to continue reading.State of Play: Connecticut
Is it the Nutmeg State? Is it the Constitution State? Only one allows for an easy demonym. That’s all the more important in a state whose name does not facilitate one (“Connecticutian?” “Connecticuter?” The syllable emphasis is awkward). What it is for sure is a Democratic state, and we’re all a bit removed from the days when a wider variety of states might earn a presidential candidate visit on the final weekend before the election – or get an impromptu speech after midnight. That’s what happened in the early morning hours of November 6, 1960, when John F. Kennedy arrived in Waterbury two days before the election. A crowd of 40,000 souls had waited hours in the rain to greet him after a day of campaigning in New York, and an exhausted Kennedy was moved to address his drenched admirers from the hotel balcony before going to bed. He spoke for nearly an hour, calling the crowd the biggest of the campaign so far. In a manner that might remind us of the contrast in vigor that has marked the 2024 race, Kennedy noted that his opponent Richard Nixon had likely been asleep for hours at that point…and not unlike the Harris’ campaign’s emphasis on not going back, he noted that “now we are moving ahead.” Kennedy campaigned the next day in Bridgeport and New Haven, and went on to win the state comfortably over Nixon.
Click to continue reading.State of Play: Georgia
The Presidency: 16 electoral votes
Georgia has made the journey from the old Democratic Solid South of the post-Reconstruction era to the mostly-solid Republican era of the post-Civil Rights era South to a highly-competitive era where it ranks in that most exclusive of categories: the modern presidential swing state. Republicans continue to dominate the Congressional and state legislative ranks thanks to maps they drew for themselves, but Democrats are back in contention for statewide races. They flipped two U.S. Senate seats in 2020 (technically January 5, 2021), one of them for an unexpired term that necessitated another election two years later. Dems won that one too, with Rafael Warnock earning a full term in a hotly-contested race with ample national attention. And of course, in 2020 Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential nominee to carry Georgia since Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory.
State of Play: New Jersey
The Presidency: 14 electoral votes
Every four years, with rare exceptions, Republicans suggest that New Jersey is in play for the presidency. The Bush campaign did so in 2004. McCain did so in 2008. A Romney surrogate did so in 2012. And lo, the usually-demure Donald Trump upheld this time-honored tradition in 2016 and again this year. In reality, no Republican has carried New Jersey in a presidential election since George H.W. Bush did so in 1988. He came close in 1992 and his son substantially reduced the Democratic margin in 2004 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, but the streak remains intact.
Within the Margin 