People doubt Trump can win in 2024?

People get hung up on 7 million votes, rather than the 43 thousand votes that actually mattered

If you talk to most Americans the 2020 election was a near landslide. But most Americans pay little attention to the details. They see polls showing Biden winning by large margins. They wake up the next day with him leading by millions of votes and an assumption of victory. They see him garner 306 electoral college votes to Trump's 232 and everything is exactly as expected.

But if you are more involved in all of this as people like me are, then the 2020 election was always considered close. Democrats were struggling with new voter registration due to Covid. They were not getting the big early vote totals in larger urban areas that they were hoping for. While the media pundits and Democratic talking heads were talking a big game, the election pundits were singing a more muted tune. Trump and Republicans were "quietly optimistic".

So when the early voting states such as Florida and Ohio (places where they don't need to talk off their shoes and socks to count to 20) were coming in showing Trump running ahead of 2016 numbers, it started looking pretty good for the incumbent. As the night went on, pundits believed Trump was winning Pennsylvania by as much as 200,000 votes and the NY Times needle had Trump at between 3-4 points up in Georgia. With Trump running ahead of 2016 in every single county in Wisconsin that had reported, he had more than enough assumed states to get to 270 and win a second term.

The betting odds on Trump at around midnight CST were up around 95% (or 20-1 against a Biden victory). Then all hell started breaking loose! Crazy overnight vote count totals in Pennsylvania, counties "finding" more ballots in Georgia, giant numbers appearing for Biden in a couple of Wisconsin counties, and the fiasco that was Arizona was starting to unfold. Suddenly, the assumed Trump repeat of 2016 performance was falling in doubt.

By Wednesday morning, all that was left was the distant memory of when things were still making mathematical sense. Now we had to figure out how Biden won 76% of the mail in votes in Pennsylvania, or how coincidental it was that the county that found ballots in Georgia had a 45% increase in turnout in Democratic voters, or where the giant voter drops come from where Biden receives well over 90% of the vote and third Party candidates actually beat Trump?

But at the end of the day this was a close election. How close? Consider the three states Trump needed to win to stay in office:

• Arizona - 10,457 vote victory for Biden (0.4%)

• Georgia - 11,779 vote victory for Biden (0.3%)

• Wisconsin - 20,682 vote victory for Biden (0.6%)

Had Trump won those three states, it would have been at 269-269 and the House of Representatives would have voted in Donald Trump as the winner in the tie-breaking procedure we have set up by constitutional law. Since his states have picked up Electoral College votes after the 2020 census, he would win outright in 2024. Oh, and that is not counting Pennsylvania where he won in 2016 and seemed to be comfortably ahead in 2020.

So where does that leave us in 2024?

Currently Biden is leading Trump by 1% in the most recent RCP average in a hypothetical matchup with Biden. That is over 6% better for Trump than his polling average against Biden in 2020. If the popular vote is within 3%, then Trump will win the 2024 election. If it is within 1% either way, he will win by a larger electoral college amount than Biden did in 2020.

Trump actually leads Harris by a significant amount and at this point Biden and Harris are the only two democrats that are being polled. Biden seems to be the best hope for Democrats. Now is this to say that Trump will come out of the gate as the favorite if he wins the GOP nomination? Well I doubt he will get that sort of credit with our mainstream media and left leaning election pundits. But unless those polls move back into that 2020 level for whatever Democrat he would be facing (presumably Biden) - then there is little logical reason not to "assume" Trump owned the frontrunner status and not to believe that he would be actually "favored" to be elected a second time.