Betrayal is bad advice
A lot of the people who voted for Trump—and who campaign for Trump locally—are people who don’t normally vote. A lot of the pundits on the right don’t seem to understand this. They give it lip service but they don’t seem to either understand or care what that means going forward.
The reason these voters don’t normally vote is a simple cost-benefit analysis. They don’t believe their vote matters. If their vote doesn’t matter, why waste time voting? More importantly, why get invested in an outcome that is predetermined?
In 2016, Trump made an implicit promise—and probably an explicit promise occasionally, I don’t follow Trump’s speeches closely, and he is very outspoken. That promise was, come out and vote for me, and this time, your vote will count. In 2016, a few people took him up on that promise; he barely made good on it. In 2020, a lot more people took him up on that promise. Whether or not he failed depends a lot on what he does and what the Republican Party does going forward.
When I wrote in Who is Trump running against? that “Telling Trump to betray the voters is bad advice” these are the people who would be betrayed if Trump “moved on” from talking about fraud in 2020. The fraud to overcome his 2020 surge was in-your-face blatant. Fraud in 2020 was so blatant that it provided us an opportunity to reform the voting process and vastly reduce fraud going forward.
More importantly, it gives us an opportunity to acknowledge to people who believe their vote doesn’t matter that they were right, that we hear them, and that we’re doing something about it. The press and the beltway would very much like to stifle that conversation. If we want to keep those voters engaged and voting, we must not give in to that stifling. We must acknowledge that fraud exists and we must not let the press and the beltway get away with their national forgetting. Trump especially needs to both keep that conversation going and continue pressuring states to reform their voting processes.
If, instead, Trump “moves on”, these people will go back to complaining that their vote doesn’t matter. And it will be far more difficult to convince them otherwise in the future because they will remember what happened in the middle of the night between November 3 and November 4, 2020. They will remember that rather than fixing a system that encourages blatant fraud, everyone who could do anything about it just… moved on.
If Trump betrays these voters, he will lose in 2024. For the beltway, of course, that’s a victory. For the non-beltway right advising Trump to move on, it is not a victory. But come the morning of November 6, 2024, those seemingly well-intentioned advisors will look at Trump’s loss, sadly shake their heads, and tell us that obviously Trump was not the right man for the job.
And they’ll be right. He won’t have been the right man because he took their advice and moved on from the new voters who supported him in 2016 and 2020.
Once these one- and two-time voters go home, it won’t matter to them who takes Trump’s place. They know their vote doesn’t matter, so what does it matter who the predetermined loser is? To paraphrase the old joke about prostitutes, we’ll have already established that their vote doesn’t matter, so why should they care if the candidate it doesn’t matter for is a DeSantis or an Abbott or some generic next-Bush-in-line?
Betrayal is bad advice for any politician; it is especially bad for a politician who hopes to encourage wider participation by opposing the beltway swamp.
In response to Election 2024: Positioning for election 2024 is already started; the campaign will heat up very quickly after November 2022.
- Millions of Americans are voting for the first time this year, and it's not just young people: Grace Hauck and Ryan W. Miller at USA Today
- “At age 99, Barbara Duvall survived COVID-19, pneumonia and five days in the hospital. Last week, the Indiana resident voted for the first time… ‘We almost lost her, but she fought her way through it,’ he said. ‘And she couldn’t wait to get her vote in for Trump.’”
- Trump Voters and the White Working Class: Stephen L. Morgan and Jiwon Lee
- “The ANES analysis indicates that approximately 28 percent of Trump’s 2016 voters were Obama voters in 2012 or nonvoters in 2012. In comparison, only about 16 percent of Clinton’s voters were Romney voters in 2012 or nonvoters in 2012.”
- Who is Trump running against?
- If Trump runs against Biden, he’ll lose, just like he did in 2020: by getting more votes but fewer ballots. It looks like Trump understands that. He’s not running against Biden. He’s running against the Democrats and Republicans who put Biden in power.
More Election 2024
- Trump, destiny, and the flood
- Is it God’s plan that Trump will win and make America better, or is it God’s plan to warn us about what we can do to make America better?
- Who is Trump running against?
- If Trump runs against Biden, he’ll lose, just like he did in 2020: by getting more votes but fewer ballots. It looks like Trump understands that. He’s not running against Biden. He’s running against the Democrats and Republicans who put Biden in power.
More President Donald Trump
- Walk toward the fire
- Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails.
- Trump and the January 6 defendants
- There appears to be a concerted effort on conservative forums to blame Trump for not doing anything for the January 6 prisoners and defendants. Is it true?
- Who is Trump running against?
- If Trump runs against Biden, he’ll lose, just like he did in 2020: by getting more votes but fewer ballots. It looks like Trump understands that. He’s not running against Biden. He’s running against the Democrats and Republicans who put Biden in power.
- Trump’s rally: the media is the dog
- I was at the rally in DC, and what I saw is completely at odds with what’s being reported.
- The cyclic transmogrification of the Republican Party
- From Lincoln on, Democrats have accused Republicans of their own failings: hate speech, violence, madness. And the more the left recycles the same serpent’s lies they used against President Lincoln, the more the left turns Trump into the new Lincoln.
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- How the left transformed vulgarity into courage and elected Donald Trump
- When you lose to Donald Trump, look inward, because it isn’t Donald Trump’s fault. The establishment left, especially the media, attacked Donald Trump just like he was Joe the Plumber. But Donald Trump has the platform to attack back. Doing so took courage, and the Plumbers of America recognized that.
- Voting should be special, not stupid
- As we move toward completely computerized ballots, long voting periods, and universal mail-in ballots, we’re telling voters that they’re clumsy, that they’re stupid, and that they’re lazy. Why should voters see voting as anything special?