PURELY POLITICAL: ELECTION 2024
by Jim Buckley
Q: Can Trump Win?
A: Yes (but it won’t be easy)
It will not be a “walk in the park,” or anything of the kind. It, instead, will be difficult.
Maybe even very difficult.
The polls do look good, but we’ve been chastened by the collapse of expectations in 2020 and again in 2022. We know how good the opposition is in “collecting” votes in critical states.
Democrats practically own, for example, most of the states that allow for unsecured ballot harvesting. Anyone – relative, friend, neighbor, casual acquaintance or hired ballot collector – can deliver your vote to be counted in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C.
Secondly, drop boxes with loose to non-existent security zones are used in 29 states. Virtually all the mountain west states are drop-box states, including Arizona, New Mexico, and Alaska. Fortunately, many of the states in that area are sparsely populated and regularly vote Republican. But recent history has shown that the larger states are vulnerable: Colorado, Arizona, and Georgia being prime examples of once reliably Red states having gone Blue or Purple.
Unsecured and unattended voter drop boxes are prevalent in Minnesota, Illinois, and Virginia, along with Pennsylvania, New York, and all New England except New Hampshire and Connecticut.
Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio allow drop boxes but are limited or restricted to certain locations. All the other Southern states below the Mason-Dixon line have either banned drop boxes outright, or, as in Georgia and Florida, allow drop boxes, but limit their availability.
The final vote tabulation among those states nearly always gives the win to Republicans.
As for ballot integrity, that too is difficult to ensure. Some 75% of eligible voters live in a state where absentee voting by mail is allowed with no excuse required. I recently received a mail-in ballot at my home addressed to a woman who lived here many years ago. There is nothing in place to prevent me from filling out her ballot and mailing it in.
Nothing.
I also received ballots for myself and my wife.
Forty-two states allow and encourage online voter registration.
Only the safely deep red states of Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi, along with the two New England states where Republicans still have a chance to win – Maine and New Hampshire – do not allow online voter registration.
Put all this together and one can see the roadblocks facing a Republican president trying to win the “popular” vote. Republicans do well in small towns and rural areas. Democrats prevail in large population centers, where massive vote collection projects are possible and relatively easy to accomplish, giving them an enormous popular vote advantage.
College and University towns have made it relatively easy to collect an overwhelming Democrat plurality there too. Although, if current polling proves accurate, the slow drift away from Democrats by college-age individuals may negate that advantage in the future.
Now, The Good News
Stay with me now:
The 2020 census added two new Congressional seats – along with their electoral votes – to Texas, one to Florida, and another to Montana.
This year’s interactive map (270towin.com) begins with a rare Republican advantage: R: 235 to D 226.
So, let’s assume Donald Trump is the Republican nominee. He’ll need an additional 44 electoral votes to become President once again. Meaning that if he took Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania in addition to those he is expected to win, he’d receive 287 electoral votes, more than enough to ensure a return trip to the White House. Even if he failed to win Arizona’s 11 electoral votes, he’d still have enough to be declared President (276).
Without Pennsylvania, the task is more difficult, though a win in either Wisconsin (278) or Michigan (283) would make up the difference. And even if he loses Arizona, he’s still the winner (272).
There are 12 various scenarios that can create a win for Trump. Nine for the Democrat candidate, presumably Biden.
We are also up against the voice of high-profile people with large followings who regularly make incendiary remarks against Republican voters in general and President Trump specifically.
Here, for example, is the latest idiocy from Joy Behar, a loud but woefully ill-informed member of the regular panel on ABC’s “The View”:
“Before Hitler became powerful, he stuck his little toe in, and the Brits and the Americans, everybody appeased him and said, he’s not going to get worse, and then they gave over the Sudetenland to him and the next thing you know he’s invading Poland and then he is occupying France, then he gets Mussolini on his side. This is what Putin is going to do. It is very, very urgent that we not elect this man [Trump]. It’s not just about us, it’s not about just the economy, it’s about the world’s geopolitical issue.”
She prefaced this statement with suggesting that Putin would invade the rest of Europe if Trump were elected because of his supposed “threats” against NATO, and that American boys will be drafted.
As scatterbrained (and angry) as Ms. Behar ordinarily is, she does represent a considerable part of the population that feels as strongly as she does: that “democracy” is in peril with the resurgence of Trump.
Another illustration is an e-mail sent out by the former publisher of the Mesa Paper, pleading that because Trump was apparently out there “brazenly articulating his bizarre and ill intentions of maybe toy[ing] with dictatorship and even suspend[ing] provisions of our Constitution if he gets back to the White House,” that… “Our democracy is being threatened. Unfortunately, a wide swath of Americans has been unknowingly corralled within a mindset that is contrary to our American values and traditions. It has turned into a cult that sees no fact nor truth and follows only the words of their Dear Leader, who are prone to untruths.”
Whew.
That’s you, and me, she’s referring to, and I’m not sure what, but I suppose she is urging you and me to vote for the Biden-Harris ticket to “save democracy.”
Sigh.
Get ready.
The onslaught has yet to begin.
I share Jim Buckley's concerns about the November election. First, HOW we vote has changed dramatically since 2020 through the various "reforms" he presents in his article. In 2016, I predicted that Mr. Trump would sweep the primaries and then go on to win the presidency. My eyes told it all. We watched his campaign rallies for months, attended by thousands and often 2 (or more) rallies in a single day, day after day up until and including the Monday night before election day. Every attendee cast a vote. By contrast, Mrs. Clinton was AWOL, including a vacation right after Labor Day -- the traditional final push of the campaign season. Her rallies were "boutiques" really, held on Cape Cod and in Beverly Hills for the wealthy far left, behind closed doors. And attended by folks who probably don't vote. What changed in 2020? Electronic voting. Universal registration. And the mother lode of gifts: Covid.
The second, an uniformed electorate today. Look at the above example of Joy Behar's history lesson. She has no idea what was at play in the 1930's. Of course Europe appeased Germany. Twenty years earlier was a war of immense slaughter. An entire generation of youth GONE. The far left counts on an ignorant, malleable citizenry. We have a challenge ahead, indeed.
I enjoy reading different political points of view in your commentaries and appreciate when they are civilly written and not an attack on the opposing writer. Nancy Freeman's posts, though, bring to mind the Oscar Wild quote "It is only the intellectually lost who love to argue".