One of the most frustrating things about this election season is the anti-Trumpers who are working overtime to convince themselves and the public that Donald Trump can’t win the election. They said the same thing in 2016, by the way, and how did that work out?
In general, I don’t think the anti-Trump contingent of the Republican Party is any more prominent than it has been in the past. It's a small but vocal group that claims to be conservative yet seems to be motivated by proving that its negative attitudes about Trump are right, and it would sooner lose the 2024 election Biden than admit that it's wrong.
I spent most of 2016 convinced that Trump couldn’t win, and polls consistently showed that he couldn’t. They were wrong. Of course, the 2020 election was another story altogether. Trump never led in the polls in that cycle either, but it took COVID-19 and mass mail-in voting to tilt the election in Biden’s favor by only a few thousand votes in a few select states.
I’ve been saying for some time that 2024 is different than any other cycle as well, largely because the disastrous Biden presidency has resulted in a paradigm shift. Because we’re having a rematch of the 2020 election, voters have the unique ability to compare their situations under the two presidents and vote based on which man’s presidency they were better off under. Hence the reason that Trump is winning in the polls.
Still, the anti-Trumpers are convinced that Trump can’t win. This stubborn refusal to ignore reality is not just based on their disconnect from approval ratings and match-up polls but also the demographic shifts that have been observed in various polls for months — particularly with the black vote.
Of course, Democrats have had a lock on the black vote for decades, and they will likely get a majority of the black vote for years to come. That isn’t really in doubt, but Trump’s position with black voters has been improving by such significant margins that it’s hard to see how anyone can be convinced Trump won’t win.
"More Black men said they plan to back Donald Trump this fall, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll of seven swing states,” the Wall Street Journal reports. "While most Black men said they intend to support Biden, some 30% of them in the poll said they were either definitely or probably going to vote for the former Republican president. There isn’t comparable WSJ swing-state polling from 2020, but Trump received votes from 12% of Black men nationwide that year, as recorded by AP VoteCast, a large poll of the electorate."
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"In the WSJ poll, 11% of Black women said they were either definitely or probably going to vote for Trump. In 2020, the AP poll found, 6% of Black women nationwide backed Trump."
As my friend Ed Morrissey at our sister site Hot Air notes, "This is not an apples-to-oranges comparison. The WSJ didn't do swing-state polling in 2020, so they're using national polling in that cycle. That's problematic, as black voters in deep-blue states will likely split differently, and thus the difference may not be quite as dramatic."
Considering how Biden only marginally won most battleground states in 2020, a modest swing in the black vote to Trump will make those states that much harder for Biden to hold onto in 2024. For example, Ed notes that Wisconsin could easily flip if there's a shift in black male support from Biden to Trump. If he loses 30 points among black men while Trump gains 20, it could make a crucial difference in a state where Biden's victory margin was slim in 2020.
The same goes for Michigan, where Biden won by a larger margin, but because it has a high black population, the shift is bound to be even more pronounced. Pennsylvania presents a similar scenario since Biden's narrow victory in 2020 relied on strong support from black voters, especially black men.
Anti-Trump conservatives convinced that Trump can’t win are ignoring this racial realignment. The black vote is going to matter a lot in this election, and it's going to help Trump.
