Why Trump Will Probably Lose (Again)
Why last night's special election in Alabama matters
Why look at actual special election results in America when one can so easily peruse gloomy compilations of national polls suggesting that Biden is perpetually “behind”? And, in the end, doesn’t that make the race all the more dramatic? It sells embattled newspapers, you see. Last night, for example, Democrats flipped a State House district in conservative Huntsville, Alabama though little is being made about it in print. We should also note that Huntsville is the most populous city in the Alabama, home to Alabama A&M and the University of Alabama/Huntsville. As a college town, Huntsville follows in a succession of swing state college towns — as revealed by the Nikki Haley campaign — where Trump is showing signs of profound weakening. Hanover, New Hampshire; Salt Lake City, Utah; Richmond, Virginia; Johnson County, Iowa and Colorado Springs all went for Haley over Trump. But Huntsville is, without question, quite a demographically interesting district to flip.
And not just “flip,” dear reader, but a blow out, with a 25-point margin in — mirabile dictu! — a Trump district. “AL-10 has gone for the Republican candidate in most elections, and when a Democrat has managed to win it, it hasn’t been by much,” notes Jay Kuo. “The only big exception was when Doug Jones was running for Senate in 2017 against a known child molester, Roy Moore.” Which is quite wild to think that it takes trolling for teenage girls at the Gadsden Mall to oust Republicans in AL-10. But, hey.
Democratic candidate Marilyn Lands won the state House seat after making in vitro fertilization and abortion rights a central campaign issue. With all precincts reporting, Lands had 63% to (Madison City Councilman Teddy Powell’s) 37%. “This election today provides an opportunity for folks at the national level to pay close attention to the South and not just write us off,” state Rep. Anthony Daniels, minority leader of the House Democratic Caucus, told Politico. Still, none dare call it — or, NY3 for that matter — bellwether. The Democrats have won three out of four special elections in the last year, on top of neutralizing the so-called “red wave” in the midterms in 2022.
So why then are the national polls not reflecting these broader trends evident in local races in the last few years? From Alan I. Abramowitz of Sabatos Crystal Ball:
Several factors may explain why the former president, who is facing dozens of felony counts in various federal and state criminal trials, is running even or ahead of the current incumbent. A key reason, of course, is that despite the strong performance of the U.S. economy recently, voter perceptions of the economy have remained quite negative, and Joe Biden’s approval rating has been stuck for months in the upper-30s to low-40s.
Aside from negative perceptions of the economy, another major contributor to Biden’s deficit in the polls during 2024 has been his surprising weakness among Black voters—a group that has been a major source of support for him in the past including during his 2020 primary and general election campaigns. During the early stages of the 2020 Democratic primaries, Black voters in South Carolina provided Biden with a crucial boost after he had lost badly in Iowa and New Hampshire. Moreover, according to national and state exit polls, almost 90% of Black voters supported Biden over Trump in the general election. Yet several recent national and state polls have shown Trump making significant inroads among Black voters.
Or, “it’s the perception of the economy, stupid.” Not its the economy, stupid — because the economy is doing fine — but the perception of an out-of-control inflation. Because, I suppose, I get that, especially on things like groceries, which the overclass doesn’t feel because they can afford to shop at Whole Foods. But does anyone really think that in 200 odd days, any significant number of African-Americans will vote for Trump against Biden, who was the running mate of the first African-American President and who himself has an African-American on his ticket? Frankly, I just don’t see it, no matter how many “confused” rappers and sports stars endorse Trump. So many poll-obsessives (red flag) swear by this bizarre notion about the cracks in the African-American voting blog. But black don’t crack.
Even if Trump picks Senator Tim Scott (doubtful!) as his running mate, it is hard to imagine any scenario in which a game-changing number of African-American voters pick Trump over Biden. Second, Tim Scott — the only African-American Republican in the Senate — has stronger ties to Christian nationalists than the black community. Further, Trump does not need him to win South Carolina and as mentioned Scott is not guaranteed to bring Trump the numbers of black votes he needs to foil Biden, so I am unsure as to what a Scott add on the ticket will do in the way of changing hearts and minds. Trump, btw, is the guy who said this last week at a rally in Dayton, OH:
They’re sending them from Africa. The Congo, last night, 22 people arrived from the Congo. Now, the Congo is a very nice place I would imagine, but they arrived from the Congo and they came from prison. Where are you from in the Congo? What’s your address? Prison. Now these are rough people.
Charmed, I’m sure. If Donald Trump actually read anything (Wharton, BS, Real Estate, ‘68), I’d accuse him of reading the garbage coming out of the Hudson Institute regarding sub-Saharan Africa. That’s how truly terrible he sounds when he speaks like this. It neither helps Trump win black votes or even suburban women. Trump, on the rare occasions that he actually reads, goes in for Hitler.
That all having been said, this Substack has already gone in granular detail as to why President Biden will probably win re-election in November. Nothing for me has changed on the ground. In brief, my arguments were: Trump’s problem with suburban and women voters, the opacity of polls this far out from election day as well as the upcoming onslaught of Trump trials, and what that will do to his “support” among independents. These are all significant obstacles that TrumpWorld faces that are not addressed by the latest Times/Siena poll 200 or so days away from the general election. But try to tell that to the editors that put together the front of legacy media institutions like the New York Times. In their struggle to remain relevant in a 24/7 media-political cosmos
Did the Supreme Court overreach on Dobbs? Alabama’s special election last night — as opposed to the pundits obsessed the polls — suggests that this is probably the case. And that is an argument backed by a slew of Democrat party overperformances in special elections since the controversial Supreme Court decision (3 out of 4 special elections in the last year). "Polls don't vote. People vote. And that's what's been happening," Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern, told US News & World Report. Despite the legacy media’s obsession with polls, "people have been voting, and they've been voting Democratic. I feel really good about November – and not just about the president. I feel really good about us taking back the House."
Further, these special elections — canaries in the coal mines, all — are providing a valuable blueprint as to what works around the country as we approach the general election. These special elections are especially instructive in that they also show us, in real time, Trump’s inability to grow his electorate. This is not inconceivably a side effect of his age, his mental health and his *cough+cough* alleged abuse of pills. Last night, Marilyn Lands won a state House seat in a rare competitive race in Huntsville, Al in large part because of her own personal abortion story, which she put at the center of her campaign contrasted against the Dobbs verdict overreach by the Trump Supreme Court majority. Lands also won because she was a mental health professional grounded in science as opposed to Trump. Republicans losing in AL-10 is an unforced error, committed largely by the party leader, Donald J Trump.
So how do democrats take advantage of these overreaches? Harry Giannoulis, the CEO and Co-Founder of The Parkside Group, serves as the lead consultants for New York’s Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, writes:
Abortion rights mobilize middle-aged women who are the swingiest of all voters and tend to otherwise make their decision late in the process. There is also more at play here than important women’s health care protections for those voters.
Abortion rights serve as a signal for where a candidate stands on larger civil rights issues related to workplace sexual harassment and pay equity. For older women who were on the lonely front lines of equality battles in the 60’s and 70’s, there is zero tolerance for going backwards on any of these issues.
There are a plethora of other issues that also serve to illustrate stark differences between the parties including gun safety laws, environmental protections, and affordability. Few suburban parents want people running around with semi-automatic weapons and none want their drinking water compromised. Affordability cuts across all voters. The Republican party’s economic theories regarding lower taxes and cuts to government services fail to convince most voters that they will see the price of milk going down.
Finally, that is not just why Donald Trump will fail at the Presidential level and his party will fail at holding onto Congress as well. Or so I believe.
“You have to finish up your war, you have to get the job done. Just brilliant. It ranks up there with his advice to the Proud Boys, ‘Stand back…and stand by,’ as an example of Trumpian double-speak. You can take this statement any which way. In favor of a cease-fire? Not quite…although there is the ‘losing a lot of support’ admonition. Crush Rafah? Also possible, with a wide-open escape hatch for Bibi: Get the job done. Trump does this all the time. It’s why he’s such an underrated politician. It’s not all just egomaniacal rant. There is an almost preternatural appreciation of the byways of the English language: Go to the Capitol…but do it peacefully. And in Georgia: Find me the votes. Don’t steal them, find them. The ‘perfect’ phone call with Zelensky…The man speaks like he’s a mob boss who suspects he’s being wiretapped. This is one way he stays two steps ahead of the sheriff.” (Joe Klein)
“Between (President Macky) Sall’s early pledges and his recent comments, however, the freedom of the press has increasingly come under threat on his watch. In 2023 alone, no fewer than ten Senegalese journalists passed through the country’s jails. Some were released under strict conditions, but at least five were still behind bars when the Committee to Protect Journalists conducted its annual global census of jailed journalists in early December, the highest such figure for Senegal since CPJ began the exercise in the early nineties. (Indeed, until 2022, Senegal hadn’t featured on the census at all since 2008, several years before Sall took office.) The journalists arrested last year faced various charges, but many of those were clearly linked to their work, including allegations that they spread ‘false news,’ discredited state institutions, ‘usurped’ the function of a journalist, and, in one group of cases, even incited ‘murder without effect’ under a Senegalese law criminalizing verbal provocation, according to CPJ. This deteriorating climate for press freedom has closely tracked a broader political crisis in Senegal, which has long been hailed as a bastion of democracy in a region increasingly marked by conflict, repression, and instability. This broader crisis led to the jailing not only of several Senegalese journalists, but of a populist opposition leader and some of his associates—as well as the postponement of elections scheduled for the end of February. In the end, following an intervention by Senegal’s constitutional council, the elections took place over the weekend, and a key ally of the opposition leader is now poised to take office. The crisis might appear to be over. But, both for Senegal’s democracy and for its press, damage has already been done, and the future remains uncertain.” (Jon Allsop/CJR)
“I’m speaking of Chuck Schumer, the Democrat who is the Senate Majority Leader and probably the most powerful Jewish elected official in America. In 2022, New Yorkers re-elected him by a comfortable 57%-43% margin, which means he’s politically quite secure. He got 3.3 million votes in that election, and just for argument’s sake, if Jews make up 15% of the overall New York electorate but vote for Democrats by a 70-30 margin, one might estimate that Schumer got the vote of about 700,000 Jews—which would put him not far from the 1.1 million votes Netanyahu’s Likud party got in the last Israeli election. Schumer certainly represents more American Jews (there are 1.8 million in New York) than any other politician, and probably also more American Arabs than any other (there are 400,000 in New York). In 2022, Schumer was the Senate’s #1 recipient of campaign donations from pro-Israel donors, according to OpenSecrets.org … So, when Schumer shifts from embracing Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu (as he did quite cravenly a year ago, shown above, during the pro-democracy protests, leading pundit Thomas Friedman to call him Bibi’s ‘useful idiot’) to declaring on the Senate floor that Bibi is one of four ‘major obstacles’ to peace, that’s no small change.” (Micah Sifry/The Connector)
“Now that he’s running from the law and for the Presidency at the same time, commies play a starring role in a Manichean campaign. Last summer, after he was arraigned on federal charges related to the insurrection, he accused Biden and the DOJ of being run by communists who were soon going to come after the rest of America. ‘If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me,’ he said after entering a not guilty plea. Stumping in Ohio shortly after, he doubled down, positioning himself as the great crusader. ‘At the end of the day, communists win and destroy America, or you destroy the communists.’” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)