Trump’s massive reelection campaign has 2016 themes — and a 2020 infrastructure

Do not underestimate Trump. He won in 2016 with an amateur campaign, just on the force of his personality and ideas. He will be even more formidable with an organized and professional infrastructure behind him.

He will lose the popular vote, but that doesn’t really matter if he focuses on his path to victory. He can easily win a majority of the electoral votes if the Democratic candidate isn’t smart and disciplined enough to campaign in the battleground states and avoid wasting time in the states where the result is a foregone conclusion.

NOTE: An updated version of that map should include Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia and Pennsylvania as well. Those four, plus the purple ones in the map, are the only states that really matter in a presidential campaign. Just about everything else is predetermined.

(I guess you could include Maine if you want to be really picky.)

So, how did Trump do in that map of the “real” America. He kicked ass.

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Any Democrat, left or center, will win California. If the Democrats nominate me to run against Trump, I would carry California, and D.C., even if I talked about naked celebrities the entire time. Similarly, every Democrat will lose certain states like Wyoming and the Dakotas. Jesus himself would lose those states with a (D) after his name. Hillary barely got 20% in some of those states.

As much as we hate to admit it, most of the country doesn’t really matter in a presidential election, because the results are a foregone conclusion. The whole battle is fought in just a few states.

That makes it all the more imperative that the Dems choose somebody fairly close to the center, because anybody talkin’ socialism and gun control will be running uphill in those battleground states.

Now I am as unscrupulous as the Republicans, so if I were advising the Democrats, here is what I would suggest. Develop a secret team whose job is to create a far-right candidate with decent financing. It doesn’t matter who he is, as long as he is a clean-cut unknown white male with decent acting skills who doesn’t mind acting a part that will forever brand him as a nutbag. Do not run him as a Republican challenger, but wait for the general election, have the team register him in every battleground state, and run him as an independent to the right of Trump. Let him siphon off Trump’s far-right supporters by attacking Trump as being soft on Islam, soft on ISIS, soft on crime, soft on the second amendment, soft on immigration, you name it. The whole white supremacy schtick. That guy, whoever he is, will get a lot of votes, because Americans are much stupider and more bigoted than you think. And those votes could be critical in the tight purple states.

20 thoughts on “Trump’s massive reelection campaign has 2016 themes — and a 2020 infrastructure

  1. I’d suggest it doesn’t matter what the Democratic nominee’s message is — it will be branded “socialism” to the extent it varies from what Trump proposes, no matter its substance.

  2. Scoop is right and not only that not a dem candidate running now can beat him.And they are falling in his trap defending themselves on being Socialists.If they don’t wake up 4 more years of Trump.

  3. You could almost say that about California alone. Donald Trump actually won the popular vote in the (USA minus California), but lost by many million when California is added back in.

    1. I see that argument made all the time about California, but we’re talking about regional differences. If the West Coast was removed from the equation, Trump would win the popular vote bigly. However, if the South was removed, the Democrat would win soundly. Republicans try to make excuses for the fact that more Americans voted to elect Clinton than Trump. They make the fallacious argument that under the popular vote, candidates would only need to campaign in California and Florida, but those two states make up only ~15% of the population. But if every vote matters equally, then the candidates would be foolish to not campaign everywhere. As it stands today, which you aptly point out, they would be foolish to waste campaign time and money at all in about 3/4 of the states.

      1. If you really break it down, it’s not even regional as much as it is demographic. It’s not “West Coast vs. South” or “Seaboards vs. Flyover” so much as it is “Urban vs. Rural.” You have to work down to county-by-county breakdowns to see it, but blue states are blue because they’ have higher amounts of blue within them, which coincides uncannily with urban centers. There are exceptions of course, like some red suburban areas and the deep blue Mississippi River Delta, but overwhelmingly, city is blue & country is red. If you look at the Carolinas, their becoming purple has coincided with the increased urbanization of the Atlanta-to-Charlotte corridor over the past 2-3 decades.

        And that only makes sense. Joe City who lives in an apartment and takes the bus to his cubicle has a completely different view of the world than Bubba Country living in a house 100 yards from his closest neighbor’s and eating something he shot for dinner.

  4. This map might be true in today’s ‘political party’ culture but if you take away the Electoral College, then the map changes to NY, FL, TX and CA. Those 4, when they vote together, have enough ‘popular’ votes to elect the President and the rest of us won’t matter. I have done the math.

    1. CA = 55, TX = 36, NY = 29, FL = 29. The total of those is 153. You need 270 to win (get over half of 438).

      So you have not done the math, and the person who told you that was lying.

      1. I misread your comment, but you are still wrong.

        CA 39.5, TX 28.7, FL 21.3, NY 19.5 = 109 million, which still isn’t half of 319 million.

        1. Nope if you did your math your figures don’t add up its 149 not 153 my third grade math class does math better than you.

        2. If you are using 319 million as your base number, your theory is already invalid as that number includes children who are not going to be eligible to vote.

          My example started with 55% of the total population, then going from there. It included assumptions that of the 55% of the eligible voters who would vote, then probably 85% would vote for the same candidate. Then if 85% of all the other states voted for the other candidate, there would not be enough other votes to overcome the Big Four votes.

      2. Not talking about the EC in that example. Talking about the so-called ‘popular vote’.

  5. I expect him to lose the popular vote by a lot, maybe 7 points, but win the election if the Democrats make any mistakes:

    1) they need a centrist to win in the swing states. They may not be able to produce one, given their typical “purity test,” where they eliminate anyone who might win.
    2) they need to campaign in the 15 or so states that matter, not screw around in states that are foregone conclusions

    You can’t write Trump off. His approval ratings are coming back (RCP says 43.5 in their current poll of polls, and the 5 most recent polls are higher), and he is currently beating the Democrats in Arizona and North Carolina, two states he barely won in 2016. (Actually he’s tied with Biden in Arizona, but ahead of the others. He beats them all in North Carolina, and by margins greater than he won the state by in 2016.)

    Don’t lose sight of the fact that, excluding California, Trump won the popular vote last time. The four and half million he lost California by – that will happen again. He may even do worse, but so what? All of those spare votes don’t help the Democrats win the battleground states.

    And you can’t underestimate Trump’s ability to woo low-info voters. Always keep this table from the mid-terms in mind. There are a lot of older, white, non-degreed people in the purple area from Minnesota to Pennsylvania, not to mention Florida and Arizona.

    Voted Democratic Voted Republican
    whites with no college degree 37% 61%
    everyone else 64% 34%
    1. Unfortunately, the analysis is largely correct. But if the economy tanks Trump is toast. And he knows it.

      1. “if the economy tanks Trump is toast. And he knows it.”

        Which is the biggest reason why the Democrats are currently engaged in a massive campaign to at least make it *look* like there is a recession coming.

        The big question is, will the American people believe what the Dems say or will they believe their own situation?

    2. The North Carolina Poll was from a Republican polling firm: Harper/Civitas (or two firms.) Real Clear politics poll site publishes numbers from some partisan polling outfits (PPP for instance) but not from Harper/Civitas. Their polls should not be regarded as credible without confirmation from other polls.

      The Arizona poll was done by a firm called ‘OH Predictive Insights’ which has a C+ rating from 538. Again, not a good track record.

      Trump’s approval rating was also around 42/43% on election day November 2018, and we saw what happened then.

      Certainly would be foolish to count a Trump reelection out, but when the best that can be said for him is that ‘he’s back to 43% approval! (again)’…for any other President, they’d be expecting to face a serious primary challenge.

  6. Sorry, you’re goofy on this.

    He won in 2016 two ways.

    1. Hillary screwed up the campaign. Wrong states, wrong message. They won’t do that again.
    2. Hillary was the wrong candidate. People do not like her. She drove people to stay home. She’s not running this time. Bernie will be a non starter, so will Warren (she’ll never live down the racial lie) but most anyone else? He’s toast, just along party lines.

    1. Well, the News Media predicted that Clinton was a lock…that likely reduced Democrats’ turnout.

      1. News I saw gave Trump 1 chance in 6 vs. Hilary, he was dead meat vs. Bernie.

        DO NOT underestimate the suckiness of, and hatred for, Hilary. People hated her for …
        sticking with Bill after Gennifer Flowers
        sticking with Bill after Monica
        never having met a war she didn’t like
        weighing in on Fight for 15 with “how about $12.50?”
        fulsome praise for Mubarak of Egypt
        …and that’s without even thinking hard or bringing her revolting cackle into it.

        I wasn’t going to vote Trump, couldn’t hold my nose and vote Hilary. I went all the way down there, voted 3rd party for pres. and whoever was good on the down-ticket.

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