Trump didn’t go to go
How, by winning more votes in defeat than he got in his 2016 victory, the president set his pawns for a "comeback" in 2024.
One thing struck me more than any other in the exit polls this year. I have written for over a year that the approval rating of an incumbent president is historically strongly correlated with the percentage of the popular vote he receives after his re-election campaign ends. Donald Trump's approval rating on November 3 was 47%. When all the votes have been counted, he will have won almost exactly 47% of the popular vote. In other words, the correlation isn't just strong this year. She is perfect.
There is more than one way to analyze these results. One of them is within Trump's popular vote defeat: it's about four points, double the amount he suffered in his victory over Hillary Clinton four years ago.
Donald Trump won the inglorious distinction of becoming the second president in American history, after Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and 1892, to lose the popular vote twice. Ultimately, more than 80 million Americans will have voted for their opponent - an all-time high - and, for the overwhelming majority of them, if we look again to the exit polls, the Support for Biden was first and foremost rooted in the desire to fire Trump.
Bitterly ironically, the incumbent president got exactly the same number of voters in the Electoral College as his sworn rival, Hillary Clinton, in 2016 - a score he for four years called a "tidal wave." Another fundamental setback, he is only the 11th president to be defeated in a re-election campaign. It’s no small slap in the face.
Except that.
Trump came close to being re-elected - very close. At the end of the day, if the popular vote makes history books, it is the constituency that determines who wins and who loses. And it would have taken a nationwide shift of 0.6% for Donald Trump to win 280 voters ... and a second term.
To put this into perspective, let's remember what many commentators have said over and over again since the 2016 election: a combination of less than 80,000 votes in three states - Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin - would have been enough. elect Hillary Clinton. What is true.
But here is what is also true: With a combination of less than 60,000 votes in three states - Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin - where more than 11 million votes were counted, Donald Trump would have been re-elected. In other words, while Clinton came close to winning in 2016, Trump came even closer to winning in 2020.
The implications for the future are not slim. Decisively defeated presidents - Herbert Hoover, who lost 42 states in 1932, or Jimmy Carter, who lost 40 in 1980 - are quickly thrown into the lap of politics. These losers even tend to be used as a political weapon by the opposing party for years. So, 12 years after defeating Hoover, President Franklin Roosevelt was still waving his specter to attack his Republican opponent Thomas Dewey during the 1944 campaign (at a time when presidents were not limited to two terms).
The reality is likely to be more complex after 2020. Yes, beyond the delusions espoused by the Trump team regarding massive fraud that has never been proven, the president will indeed leave the White House on January 20. However, if he wants to continue to exert influence on his party and, more broadly, on American politics, things are looking pretty good for him.
This is especially true as, even though he was beaten, Trump got both a higher number of votes and a higher percentage of the vote than four years ago - a historic exception in and of itself. And as if that weren't enough, some preliminary data suggests that the surge in voter turnout between 2016 and 2020 actually helped it far more than it hurt it. A post-election survey reveals this remarkable fact: Trump voters outnumber Biden's voters want their candidate to run again in 2024.
In other words, even in defeat, Donald Trump enjoys tremendous support and enthusiasm among the American electorate. It is not for nothing that even before having conceded the victory to Joe Biden, Donald Trump would have confided to his advisers his very serious intention to run in the next election - he who will then still be eligible for a second term.
In the Republican upper echelons of Washington, several undoubtedly heaved a long sigh of relief at the news of the defeat of the man who engaged in a sort of hostile takeover of their party in 2016. Remainder to see if this defeat will really be enough to get rid of it completely.
