If you read only the news itself and completely ignored polls these last few months you would be very hard pressed to argue what fat former President Trump and the party completely subservient to him have going for them with seven months and six days left to go before the election.
They’re hurting for money and disorganized. House Republicans can’t govern for shit, failing miserably in their quest to invent a pretext to impeach Joe Biden, decapitated their highest ranking elected official, and are threatening to do so again five months later. The party’s led by a racist madman facing 88 felony counts whose last term ended in disaster with his fans literally sacking the United States Capitol. They’ve been humiliated again and again and again in special and off-year elections far and wide after the worst midterm for the opposition party in 20 years. Trump’s already telling Nazi “Doctor” Sebastian Gorka the Democrats are going to steal the 2024 election from him.
Who knows if he was saying it because he says it about every election or if he’s genuinely starting to worry about his prospects in November. It very well could be the latter. And he’s not alone.
Tonight will be the largest fundraiser in political history – $25,000,000 in hard money raised in a single evening for Biden.
This is more raised in one night than Trump raised the entire month of February.
Democrats are beginning to fine tune their messaging, and they have a…
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) March 28, 2024
“Democrats are beginning to fine tune their messaging, and they have a standing army of 5,000+ full-time organizers on the ground in the key states. We are outgunned and will be outspent. The polls are tightening. Time to get to work. The country is at stake,” wrote small faced “youth movement” gauleiter Charlie Kirk, dialing up the fear meter by three or four percent.
Advice for president Trump. I’m glad you are ahead in the polls. In order to win, pls run your campaign from this day fwd as if you are behind
— Chuck Grassley (@ChuckGrassley) March 28, 2024
Axios’s Sophia Kai suggests Old Man Grassley was responding directly to Trump Campaign Senior Adviser Chris LaCivita putting out a press release projecting confidence that the fat fuck will annihilate Biden. “Joe Biden secured his nomination on January 1, but he’s underwater in national polls and just now after three months – staffing up key battleground states. In contrast, the Trump campaign, after shattering records in primary and caucus wins in both turnout and margin across the country, has locked up the nomination in one of the fastest timelines in modern day political history. With an operation fueled by hundreds of thousands of small dollar donors and energized supporters, and without sharing our strategy with Democrats through the media, we have the message, the operation, and the money to propel President Trump to victory on November 5,” LaCivita wrote.
Stick a pin in that “shattering records in primary and caucus wins in both turnout and margin across the country” for a few minutes while we point out the “underwater in national polls” is actually no longer true if you go by the Economist’s average, which now shows them tied at 45.
That’s the first since September 2023, when more or less inexplicably Trump began leading for some goddamned reason. Now suddenly and just as inexplicably The Narrative™ says “the polls are tightening,” as if Donald is somehow any less unhinged and corrupt as he was six months ago.
There is a real case to be made that Joe Biden is in the midst of a polling comeback.
I lay it out here: https://t.co/6luNT1RqQU pic.twitter.com/1wkK8kUz26
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) March 27, 2024
We of course feel the average liberal’s disgust that the polls show a break-even chance that the fat fuck could return to power. In a sane world – one in which National Zero has no reason to exist – the average would be Biden 70 to Trump 30 percent. The bargaining and denial stages of that grief keep coming out here, sticking us in the position of looking like complete assholes by printing stories about favorable horserace numbers while ignoring the unfavorable ones – and couching it in all sorts of third-order excuses about how doing so is a defiance of the cuntish obtusity of The Experts™ who would have had you abandon all hope a month ago but (some of them) are now seeing a “vibe shift.”
It’s stupid. We’re open to other ways to work when the polls are both bad for our guy AND fucked.
Because they are fucked. Even while the eggheads are telling you to “trust the averages” and everything they’re also telling you that like some serious like bedrock underlying data supporting those numbers does not at all jibe with past patterns. From Sabato’s Crystal Ball this week:
Recent national and swing state polls have shown surprisingly strong support for Donald Trump among Black voters. In the most recent New York Times/Siena national poll, for example, 23% of Black voters supported Trump over Joe Biden. If Trump actually receives 20% or more of the Black vote in the presidential election, this would represent a major breakthrough for the GOP. No Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon in 1960 has received anything approaching this level of support among Black voters.
The evidence presented in this article suggests that there are reasons to be skeptical about claims of an impending breakthrough for Trump and the Republican Party among Black voters. Based on evidence from the 2020 American National Election Study, there was no increase in the Republican share of the Black vote. Nor did the 2020 ANES show any significant divisions in the preferences of Black voters based on characteristics such as education, age, and gender. There was no evidence of a surge in working class support for the GOP among Black voters similar to that seen in recent elections among white voters.
Evidence from the 2022 elections also showed little evidence of any surge in Black support for Republican candidates. According to exit poll data from the 2022 House, Senate, and gubernatorial elections, the level of Black support for Republican candidates, approximately 10% on average, was similar to that seen in elections over the past few decades. In addition, evidence from exit polls on participation in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries also shows no evidence of any surge in support for the GOP among black voters. Even in states with open primaries with large Black electorates such as South Carolina and Virginia, the Republican primary electorate remained overwhelmingly white.
The TLDR is that a New York Times poll finding Trump with 23 percent Black support is about as reliable as a financial statement saying his Trump Tower condo is 30,000 square feet. And just like that fraudulent statement, once you correct for it the bottom line shifts unfavorably against him.
It’s a pretty big fucking deal that of course went completely unnoticed in a world where DEI is being blamed because a containership plowed into a bridge. It’s far more quantifiable than the quiet apprehension from “top Republicans” telling reporters on background that they’re scared shitless that not only is Trump going to lose but he’s going to take the rest of the GOP down with him, or the not-so quiet apprehension from small-faced assclown Charlie Kirk.
There’s another underrated, maybe even more significant, problem for Trump. Very much a quantifiable one. It’s not the number or percentages of Republican primary voters turning out for Nikki Haley even though she was doomed from the very beginning of that charade of a nominating contest. Politico already told you socialist libs “Polls overestimated Trump in the primary. Don’t expect that to translate to November,” so stop fondling yourselves (even though this morning they also printed “Trump’s weaknesses with GOP voters go beyond the suburbs“).
Remember how Texas was the great hope of Democrats?
Vote totals of previous incumbents clearly show this is a pipe dream!
TRUMP: 1,889,006
OBAMA: 520,410
W. BUSH: 635,948
CLINTON: 796,041Keep dreaming Dems. Texas loves @realDonaldTrump ‼️
— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) March 18, 2020
It’s one in the MAGA Reich’s own metric of success, the one that in early 2020 foretold of his overwhelming strength in the general election, what as we noted above, that LaCivita asshole claimed that his boss is “shattering records in primary and caucus wins in both turnout and margin.”
Emphasis on “turnout”… Which is not being shattered. Here’s Trump’s scorecard so far this year:
| Date | State | 2020 | 2024 | Percentage change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January 15, 2024 | Iowa | 31,421 | 56,243 | + 79.00 |
| January 23, 2024 | New Hampshire | 129,734 | 176,392 | + 35.96 |
| February 27, 2024 | Michigan | 640,552 | 761,163 | + 18.83 |
| March 2, 2024 | Idaho | 111,136 | 33,603 | – 69.76 |
| March 3, 2024 | DC | 1,559 | 676 | – 56.64 |
| March 5, 2024Super Tuesday | Alabama | 696,832 | 497,739 | – 28.57 |
| Arkansas | 238,980 | 204,898 | – 14.26 | |
| California | 2,279,086 | 1,953,411 | – 14.29 | |
| Colorado | 628,876 | 555,673 | – 11.64 | |
| Maine | 95,360 | 78,493 | – 17.69 | |
| Massachusetts | 239,115 | 340,312 | + 42.32 | |
| Minnesota | 137,275 | 232,846 | + 69.62 | |
| Oklahoma | 273,738 | 254,688 | – 6.96 | |
| Tennessee | 384,266 | 447,219 | + 16.38 | |
| Texas | 1,889,006 | 1,808,269 | – 4.27 | |
| Vermont | 33,984 | 33,155 | – 2.44 | |
| March 12, 2024 | Georgia | 947,352 | 497,424 | – 47.49 |
| Mississippi | 240,127 | 225,683 | – 6.02 | |
| Washington | 684,239 | 600,762 | – 12.20 | |
| March 19, 2024 | Florida | 1,162,984 | 910,897 | – 21.68 |
| Illinois | 520,956 | 474,780 | – 8.86 | |
| Ohio | 713,546 | 889,001 | + 24.59 | |
| March 23, 2024 | Louisiana | 195,910 | 172,474 | – 11.96 |
You’ll notice that some states are missing. South Carolina and Arizona, for example, canceled their GOP primaries in 2020 so we have no point of comparison to 2024. Missouri had a “firehouse caucus” or some bullshit. Nevada was a mess. The Virgin Islands didn’t record the votes in their 2020 caucus because Trump was uncontested there, so on and so forth. Trump did exceed his 2020 turnout in Iowa and New Hampshire as he hit campaign trail in those states. His fans certainly showed up in Michigan too as that was still early on. Further down the calendar we’re at a loss to explain Massachusetts and Minnesota other than that MAYBE sharing some media markets with New Hampshire and Iowa might have rubbed off, but that can’t be the whole thing, especially with Minnesota. Ohio we can chalk up to the down-ballot Senate primary on the same day. Texas AG Ken Paxton’s impeachment revenge tour very likely staunched the bleeding in the Lone Star State. Who the hell knows with Tennessee. They had a lot of local elections the same day but so did California.
The bottom line is that where we can compare 2024 to 2020, the “quasi-incumbent” Trump is down a total of nearly nine million primary votes than when he was the incumbent and his fanboys screamed at the tops of their lungs about how much “enthusiasm” it showed he had going into the November election. It’s a 69 percent drop in primary turnout for the fat fuck across 22 states and the District of Columbia. It does not matter how many votes Nikki Haley got, or that she won DC and Vermont, or whether a primary was open or closed. Besides the fact that DC, Georgia, and Ohio moved their primaries up a few months, this is just about as apples-to-apples as you can get.
And it’s a bad apple for the orange.
“Impeachment has lit a fire under the Trump base – and I anticipate it will burn until Election Day in November. Voter intensity is a key element in electoral success,” former Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman and then the pro-Trump Republican Jewish Coalition’s chair told Politico in the above article, published on February 16th, 2020, before everything went to shit with COVID-19.
That’s where the bar was then and where it sits now. If Trump’s turnout in the largely uncontested 2020 GOP primaries said everything about his dominance and the “intensity” of his base then what does Trump’s turnout in the slightly-less uncontested 2024 GOP primaries say?
Let’s throw in some “context” too: If that turnout in 2020 was the “fire” over an impeachment that was nothing more than a symbolic stain (as Dems knew there was no chance he would be removed) then is the turnout in 2024 a response to 88 felony charges in four different jurisdictions for which he will quite literally die in prison if convicted of a fraction of them a smaller “fire”? Shouldn’t the worse consequences make heat up a more fiery response from MAGAmerica?
Most importantly: How the fuck has nobody noticed a 69 percent drop in turnout yet?
How do you know none of the Democrats on that stage stand a chance in November?
President Trump just held a massive rally in Arizona—a state Democrats need to win to take back the White House
And THIS was the OVERFLOW!
Trump enthusiasm is unmatched
RT! pic.twitter.com/oiZjRDbvwh
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 20, 2020
This was a bit too long and all over the place. Too much news crowding out the bandwidth needed for perspective. The overall takeaway should be clear enough however: There are some visible cracks in the foundation of what the polling and “vibes” purport to be a colossus of Trump and GOP electoral strength. The question is whether the cracks are on the surface or if they go deeper.
Or as a smarter guy Josh Marshall put it this week about the RNC and House GOP clusterfucks: “I don’t think we can count out the possibility that a combination of demoralization and division, structural breakdown and insufficient funding could lead to a dramatic underperformance in GOP congressional and other campaigns this year… If something like I’ve described did happen, I think it’s pretty clear people would be saying that all the signs were there and people didn’t put them together or draw the obvious conclusion. Just something to keep in the back of your mind.”
CORRECTION 4/3/2024 12:37 PM EDT: Really fucked this one up. It was not a 69 percent drop. It was a 6.9 percent drop. Very big difference. Still not a great stat for Trump.