Time to Move on From Trump: A Historical Look at his Chances of Election

Regardless how you feel about Trump, the history and politics are clear, he will not win in 2024.  

Transcript

Time to Move On from Trump

A historical look at his chances of Election

April 2023

Last January, I created a podcast called “Fighting and Winning,” in which I contrasted notable fighters Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump and their electoral records. If we include the elections while the leader of their parties, Jackson’s record was 4-1 in his campaigns, winning the popular vote every time and even in his only loss, he could have faced a “corrupt bargain,” as he called it. Assuming John Quincy Adams had not offered influential Representative Henry Clay the Secretary of State’s office, it was conceivable Clay could have turned the House, which was deciding the winner of the Election of 1824, to Jackson, running his tally to 5-0. Trump’s record is 1-4. Some might be comfortable with that 25% winning percentage. I would not be among them.  

Then there is the Trump personality. He disparages Democrats, not ideologically, not politically, but personally. But his worse attacks today are aimed at Republicans because he now sees the party as his fiefdom, which it is, and like his spurious claims about the 2020 election, must never be stolen from him as if he was Lord of the Republicans. Trump’s persona resembles the barbaric children in Lord of the Flies.  

I would contrast that with a description of the only man who successfully set out to do what Trump is trying today, to be elected to the presidency, lose, and come back. In his autobiography of the 22nd (and 24th) president, historian Henry F. Graff states, “He was revered by millions of his contemporaries for his genuine merits, especially integrity. 

They had seen virtue enough in him to accord him popular majorities in three consecutive presidential elections.” Now I am a fan of the Electoral College, warts and all, but the fact that one can get elected to the highest office in the land without a majority of votes is still telling. Though Cleveland won the Election of 1884, he narrowly lost reelection due to the loss of two states he earlier won, New York, and Indiana, the latter being the home state of the winner of 1888, Benjamin Harrison. The Election of 1888 was one of the closest in American History. How did Cleveland handle this loss? With his typical honesty. When it was suggested that a fellow New York Democrat did not get out the vote due to that person’s ambitions, getting rid of Cleveland would have cleared the way Cleveland suggested the real reason he lost was, “It was mainly because the other party got more votes.”  

Like Trump, Cleveland decided to run again after the midterm elections. The difference was that Cleveland saw the elections of 1990 as a bloodbath for the opposite party. Wherein in 2022, every one of Trump’s chosen Senate candidates lost. Supporters of Cleveland started encouraging him to run after the 1890 midterms, which they viewed as a repudiation of President Harrison. And Cleveland only really faced one major opponent, David Hill of New York, Cleveland’s successor as Governor of the Empire State. In 1892 he again, for the third time in a row, won the Democratic Party nomination on the first ballot – back when convention ballots mattered. In a piece by Oliva Waxman, the author notes, “Congress under the Harrison Administration was nicknamed the “billion dollar Congress” because it was the first time a billion dollars in federal dollars was spent. Cleveland was a fiscal conservative, dedicated to lowering tariffs, solidifying the gold standard, and reducing public spending. During the Gilded Age, when corruption in politics was rampant, Cleveland had a reputation for representing honesty in politics. The backlash to high tariff policies and a wave of violent labor strikes at silver mines in the summer of 1892 made voters think Harrison didn’t have enough of a handle on economic policy. They remembered better times under Cleveland.  What exactly are Trump’s policy proposals for his second term? 

Hard to know amidst the daily attacks on Ron DeSantis or Trump’s whining about his indictment and the 2020 election. Do I think Alan Bragg is a political opportunist setting a frightening precedent? Yes. I also think paying six-figure hush money to a porn star so your wife does not learn of your affairs is crappy.   

Two podcasts ago, I argued the difference between a CINO, or conservative in name only, and the real thing defined by Burke, Kirk, Hayek, Friedman, and Will. I used exemplars of what a real conservative looked like and provided the contention that Donald Trump is not a conservative. 

During that February podcast, I contended that a conservative brand can (and should win) in American elections. We saw that in the 1980s, again in the 2000s, in 2010, and as recently as 2014, when the GOP picked up 9 Senate seats, enabling a tax cut, deregulation, and a solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court.  

Let me be more explicit. 

Donald Trump is now cancer on conservatism, the Republican party, and our Republic. It is time to move on. Time to move him from the present to the history books. Then there is the counter to my opinion: any GOPer is better than a progressive. This makes more sense than a debate on Trump’s merits, but Trump’s cancerous nature dovetails with this argument, as I have noted before. He cannot win, and if he is in any way a part of the 2024 election, as the GOP nominee, running as a third party candidate, or even as a political influencer, suppressing the vote as he did in 2022 and thus losing two Georgia seats and the Senate, or weighing in on losing candidate propositions as in 2022, the GOP will lose. The result will undoubtedly be that which Trump supporters decry; accumulated power for the Progressive party.  

But dear listeners, this is not a screed on Trump’s personality or whether he should win the GOP nomination. Instead, this is a historical look at the past elections of our Republic over the last 230 years and, based on this quantitative evidence, makes the case that Trump cannot win and any GOP primary Trump vote is a total and absolute waste.  

I am not of the so-called never trump ilk dominated by figures such as Mona Charen, William Kristol, or the utterly discredited and disreputable Lincoln Project. Nevertheless, I voted for him twice, in 2016 and again in 2020. 

He was not my first choice in 2016, my 5th or 6th behind Rubio, Christie, Bush, or even Cruz. 

So my 2016 vote was reluctant.  

Not so in his reelection bid. My 2020 vote was without the equivocations of 2016. By 2020 I had a tax cut, a conservative SCOTUS, the Abraham Accords, and no more Russian territorial gains. We were not fighting a major war but still had Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, both of which I would have maintained bases. But since then, we have experienced stop the steal, January 6, his aforementioned indictment, and as far as I can tell, absolutely no policy plan. His 2022 candidates lose, and we can now add the 2023 versions in Wisconsin. Every candidate he touches, every Election in which his name is paramount, leads to defeat.  

And onto, or should say, back to, the past.  In that oh-so-distant past of 11 years ago, there was a time when a failed bid for president on the GOP meant you did not run again. The exception, as he presented so many exceptions, was Richard Nixon. As a VP, he lost the Election of 1960 to return in 1968, after a Goldwater defeat in 64, to win the presidency. More typical is the GOP president who won a first term, was renominated, lost that Election, and never ran again.  

·         Hoover did not run in 1936. 

·         Ford did not run in 1980.

·         HW Bush did not run in 1996.            

And in this last case, why not? Perot’s third-party candidacy, which arguably siphoned more votes from Bush than Clinton, would be far more plausible in 1996 than Trump in 2024.  

Since you are a consumer of this podcast, your historical chops are above average, but dear listener, how familiar are you with these names? Alf Landon or Wendell Willkie? Those were the sacrificial lambs laid at the altar of Franklin Roosevelt’s terms. And then we come to Thomas Dewey. He was defeated by Roosevelt in 1944 and was that rare breed of GOPers to be nominated again and then lost in a winnable election to Harry S Truman in 1948. Then we have Barry Goldwater, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. The GOP nominated all of them, all of them lost, and none were nominated again.  

And it is not just the GOP who plays this game. The Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan three times and Adlai Stevenson twice. The thinking goes, “This time, it WILL be different.” The thinking is wrong. Nixon is that exception but a confluence of events, ranging from the failures of the Great Society, a reaction to the upheavals of the Civil Rights movement, the incumbent’s health, and above all, the Vietnam War that brought Nixon back. Could this perfect storm happen again? Possibly. But the improbability of it is exemplified by the math. Losers becoming winners is not just unique; it is as rare as marathon runners bellying up to the tables at a Golden Corral.  

And to indulge in true hard-core History. Here is the LIST, the grand total of all those who ran, lost but emerged Phoenix-like from the flames to win the highest office in the land:

• Thomas Jefferson lost in 1796 to Adams but won in 1800
• John Quincy Adams lost to James Madison in 1820 but won in 1824 (as noted in the corrupt bargain election)
• The aforementioned Jackson, in 1824, lost to Adams, won in 1828
• William Henry Harrison lost in 1836 and won in 1840 (well, for about a month-ouch)

Lots of opportunities for these Early American Republic figures to redeem themselves. Still, now we need to jump about 48 years and 12 presidential elections forgoing great names such as Horatio Seymour (as frequent listeners know, I take pride in my history chops but have no idea who that guy was).  

• We are now in the realm of Grover Cleveland, whom we have already met
• We then need to jump another SEVENTY-SIX years, which brings us to Nixon.  

That leaves six men out of the 59 presidential elections we have had in our History, or roughly 10%. So let’s then take out those early Republic elections. 

In the past 182 years, only two men, Nixon and Cleveland, have lost a presidential election and gone on to win again. This is why the Doles and Mondales are ascribed to political oblivion. In words from the 2001 A Knight’s Tale, they had been weighed, measured, and found wanting. This now gives us a percentage of 2 elections out of the past 45 presidential elections, or 4%, which have seen a beaten candidate come back. But the contention is that Trump is different, he is after all a fighter. 

So let’s look at a few other Trump facts. Before Covid, he had an excellent economy, partly through his policies. So the contention is that without COVID, he would have walked in. But History tells a different story. In the 1912 election, Woodrow Wilson won because the GOP split the vote. Yet he won outright in 1916, during the crisis of World War I. Roosevelt used the troubles of the Great Depression and World War II to win four times. 

Lyndon Johnson won a landslide during Vietnam in 1964. Crises tend to strengthen the executive. Being commanding when confronting a crisis is easier than haggling over the debt ceiling. The people tend to be more reluctant to switch horses crossing a roaring river. Trump fumbled his crisis. Why? I covered some of this in my January 5, 2021, podcast called “Two days that Cost Trump the Presidency” but I will sum up. He made the crisis about himself.  

Then there was January 6. All of the Tucker Carlson cannot put that genie back into the bottle. Even assuming that somehow it was much more peaceful than it appeared, it does not matter. The narrative is that Trump’s rally ignited a riot at the capitol. And the suburbs of Milwaukee, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Pittsburgh, where the next Election will be resolved, that narrative will not change.  

Nor will the fact that post 1.6.21 he suppressed the vote in GA, thus losing two winnable Senate seats in Georgia and handing control of the Senate to the Democrats, who already had the House. What followed was the spending of nearly $3 trillion in additional funding almost entirely to serve Democratic Party interests and the nomination of Kentaji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.  

The Mar A Lago raid is one of those examples of whataboutism. Joe Biden did the same thing. But consider the other side of the coin. How awesome would it have been if Trump had not kept classified documents and Biden did commit this illegality? If Trump had been more Cleveland-like and a little less, well, Trump-like. I hear a lot of and engage in whataboutism myself. However, I still believe that the more the GOP rises above this crappy behavior, the more we can use it as a political cudgel against the Left. Reagan did not win 49 states because he could fight as dirty as the Left; he won because he was seen as better than the Left. Nixon did not win a landslide against McGovern because he was as radical as the South Dakotan, he won because he was not seen as a radical.  

And there is the one Election Trump did win. His opponent was arguably the worst retail politician in American History. Let’s not put too fine a point on this. She was in that position because of who she married. And this is not a slam on women. Denis Thatcher did not run. Joachim Sauer, husband of former 13-year German Chancellor Angela Merkel, did not run. 

These people chose to abstain from elections because they did not share Hillary’s ambition and knew they did not possess their spouses’ charisma.  

Without Bill, Hillary Rodham would have been some mid-level functionary in the Department of Transportation, the IRS, or a policy wonk for the Center for American Progress. And, of course, she carried the baggage of not one or two scandals. If every scandal she was a part of were a book, they could fill a small library or even a large one. Before her husband began his first term, there was whitewater and the money-making miracle where lawyer Hillary turned $10,000 into 100,000 in…cattle futures. There were also the defenses of Bill’s boorish behaviors and the defensive ding and arrangement” about his infidelity.

Then, her “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies,” as if Hillary was the first wife of a president who had a career. After the inauguration, there was Travelgate, Vince Foster, Hillary Care, and vast right-wing conspiracies. And after 2000, the Clinton Foundation and her illegal email server were there. Of all Trump’s childish schoolyard bully taunting his Crooked Hillary was especially effective because it had the ring of truth. The one thing she had going for her, especially in the Democratic party, was her gender. After all the I’m with HER campaign was the centerpiece of her efforts. In the end, Hillary was, and is, an unlikeable person. She is fine to be a firefighter, a columnist, a bureaucrat, an actor or garbageman, and even a podcaster but does not work as a politician. That is who Trump beat. What beat him in 2020? A doddering old man and his cackling ninny running mate.

And these elections are just the major ones. Christian Schneider, in a piece written in March 2023, contested that a Supreme Court loss in Wisconsin was not due to abortion as Democrats, and many Republicans, insist, “So now everyone thinks a conservative losing to a liberal in Wisconsin is a microcosm of the national mood on abortion. But to paraphrase Eli Cash: Maybe it’s not. A perfectly plausible story about conservative Dan Kelly’s embarrassing loss can be written without using the word that, to quote Jonah Hill’s Knocked Up character, “rhymes with shmashmortion. To start, one can look at Kelly’s personal toxicity with the voters of Wisconsin. This is a guy who was appointed to the state supreme court by former governor Scott Walker in 2016, then proceeded to lose as an incumbent by eleven percentage points just four years later. This was a full two years before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which sent the abortion issue back to the states.

Instead, the Kelly race last week seems more like a continuation of a Jordan Peele–worthy horror movie the GOP has found itself in since the Election of Donald Trump as president. Trump won Wisconsin in 2016; when he took office, conservatives held virtually every elected office in the state and enjoyed a seemingly insurmountable 5–2 majority on the state supreme court. Indeed it was the pre-Trump era of 2010-2014 when Wisconsin turned from blue to reddish purple.  

Since then, it has been a cataclysmic run, with Republicans/conservatives losing 14 of 17 statewide races, including two gubernatorial races and control of the supreme court. As Trumpism infected the state party, it hemorrhaged talent, letting its most feral members call the shots. In doing so, the party threw away its best chance of winning major races. In 2022, party primary voters opted for Michels, an unsuccessful Senate candidate 18 years ago, instead of TV-ready former lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch. Michels was woefully underprepared, sweating like a honey ham under the lights of the debate stage. And yet he still almost won.”

Much speculation about a Trump loss in the primaries would almost certainly mean he would depress the vote for the eventual GOP winner. I would argue that is reason enough not to vote for him but consider the alternative. For those Trumpistas who so desire a fighter, consider this: if Newsom decided to run and unseat Biden and lost, he would be there in October 2024 campaigning for Biden for all he was worth. And there is the alternative to Trump supporters sitting this one out. 

If a rump group of Always DeSantis voters decide to sit out, Trump would lose in a 2016 scenario, and it is not 2016 anymore. If DeSantis, Nikki Hayley, Tim Scott, and the ghost of Ronald Reagan were all stumping for him, Trump would still lose but what if those diehard Ronistas stay home after Trump savaged their guy? It would and will happen.  

And finally, what would the fighter be fighting for exactly? Again, I think there is no ghost of a chance he will win in 2024; I also love Star Wars, Star Trek (pre-2009), and Lord of the Rings, so I can do fantasy. In 2016 he had the House and the Senate. It was Trump-backed candidates that lost in 2022. There is no reason to think they would win in 24. So here is Trump, without the House and the Senate doing what exactly? 

Tax cuts? Getting conservatives on the Supreme Court? Taking XI or Putin to the woodshed? None of those things would happen. Instead, he would double down on loyalists with little to no experience, rely on acting this or acting that in his cabinet, making most of the executive rulings unsustainable, and vent his spleen using the bully pulpit as his podium. 

The simple counter to this scenario is better than a Democrat. That was my thinking in 2016 and 2020, so I pulled the lever for Trump. But I do not just wish to prevent the Democrats from achieving power. I want a conservative agenda that is way different than a Trump agenda. And Trump’s ability to tarnish the GOP will set up the kind of Democratic rule and majorities we saw in the 1930s and the 1960s, creating damage that will be irrevocable.  

It is hard enough to beat an incumbent, even a weak one like Biden, but for Trump to do it? A guy with more baggage than United, American, and Delta Airlines combined? 

American History says he will not win. 

Recent History ranging from 2018 through 2023 says he will not win. The polls say he will not succeed. I get there is a certain kind of person who will go with Trump for no other reason than some childish notion that if Trump were to pull it off, said supporter would get to say I told you so. I do not need to ID those people; you can see them on Fox News or tune in on some four-digit station on the AM dial. Others like the show. A man who lived in the limelight his entire life and hosted a reality TV show knows how to entertain. But this is not serious, like Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson supporting the Stop the Steal nonsense on air while disparaging it off the air. They know there is a lucrative business supporting the kamikaze Trump campaign. Someone as savvy as Molly Hemingway or smart as Tucker Carlson knows Trump will lose. 

But they have books to sell and ratings to maintain, and when he does lose, there is more cash to be had by claiming he was cheated again! So they will win in the short term; the nation will lose in the long.  

What is it, exactly do we want from our politicians? I do not want them to be my hero. I definitely do not need them as my or my family’s role models. For entertainment, I pay enough for my cable, streaming services, rock show tickets, and sporting event attendance. I do not need Trump to do this for me.  

What I need from my politicians are efficient government services that matter, like a solid police force, good roads, and a standing army that can fight and protect. I do not need politicians to decide how to educate my children and tell me what to eat or which car to drive. The Democrats will do all of that. There will be no GOP president to stop them because Trump lost again.  

By saying I cannot and will not vote for Trump will be reviled by his supporters, who will claim I am enabling a Democrat into the office. Of course, I loathe this-both this concept and Democrats getting into office. 

From Obama’s Affordable Care Act and his overweening arrogance to Biden’s throwing supposed COVID money to his public union constituents to his bloated boondoggle build back better crap bill, Democrats should not be anywhere near the levers of government. 

But, and I cannot emphasize this enough, Trump is now their best chance to get elected. And without some drubbing, he will disparage a Republican candidate enough to make them unworthy and/or run as a 3rd party candidate and split the vote. The end result in all three cases is the same, four more years of Biden with the chance that his creaky, doddering 80-year-old heart will succumb to inevitability and surprise! – President Kamala Devi Harris.