Democrats, like the Denver Nuggets, do what it takes to win.
Democrats turned Election Day into Election Season––destroying the beautiful patriotism of Americans coming together on one day––but this is how the game is now played. Trump, MAGA still don't get it.
A desultory two weeks ago, the defending NBA champion Denver Nuggets defeated my Los Angeles Lakers in game five of their NBA series, ending the Lakers’ mercurial season. A four-one series loss belies how close most of the games were. The Lakers were actually up for almost 80% of the minutes played. Last year’s Western Conference Finals sweep by the Nuggets followed the same pattern: close games, often dominated by LA, pulled out by Denver in the end.
On paper, LA looks daunting, featuring two future hall-of-famers in LeBron James and Anthony Davis, a series of role players who would be go-to guys on another squad, a deep-pocketed franchise, and a long legacy of achievement from Prime Time Pat to Zen Master Phil. But this ramshackle iteration of the Lakers can’t get it done unless you count the play-in tournament and COVID bubble.
It’s not the talent. It’s not even the serviceable, if uninspired, coaching. It’s the will to win. Denver has it. They put bodies on the floor to get loose balls. They play as a unit. They pass. They adjust. They close.
In LeBron James, you see a generational superstar with multiple other interests—advertising, coaching, music, film, playing pro ball with his son Bronnie, and various nonprofits. In Denver’s three-time MVP Nikola Jokic, you see a serious, steady, workman-like player interested in getting his NBA work done quickly and efficiently, so he can spend the summer in Serbia with his horses.
For Trump voters, politics is about entertainment (James). For Democrats, it’s about winning (Jokic) so they can continue remaking the world in their Woke Socialist image. Democrats have a vision. They are for something, however dangerous it might be.
When I think about all the things that went LA’s way in the Denver series, yet they still found a way to lose, I think of the 2024 election. Joe Biden is on the ropes. Per the Real Clear Politics poll of polls, Trump has moved ahead of Biden in all seven swing states and more so in a five-way race that includes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornel West. Weirdly, Biden is closing the gap in Michigan, where opposition to his and Israel’s Gaza strategy is high. Though down in every popular and electoral vote total, Biden is up in betting markets, which might be the most accurate election prognosticator since bettors put skin in the game, while voters have displayed a tendency of late to tell pollsters one thing and do another.
Still, Dems are worried. The President is a distinct cry from his former self (and that wasn’t much). To hide his halting, unstable gait, staff now place a phalanx of “walkers” around him to block or distract cameras when Biden exits the White House aircraft. If you add in Biden’s failure to conduct challenging media interviews, one could surmise that we have not seen such a coordinated effort to hide a president from public scrutiny since Woodrow Wilson.
Due to Biden's overspending, inflation remains stubbornly high. On his watch, the world and college campuses are at war. The border is wide open. And urban crime, aided and abetted by feckless Democratic mayors, is omnipresent.
In my NBA analogy, it’s near the end of the second quarter, and the Lakers are growing their lead. Clarion calls are arriving from the Shaq and Chuck of Democratic politics: James Carville and Michael Moore. But here’s what Republicans, like Denver’s opponents, never see coming: chemistry, selfless play, a relentless drumbeat of energy and grit that never takes a play off, never takes anything for granted, and never plays down to the competition, plus implacable confidence, pluck, and clutch play that appears when it most counts, demoralizing the opposition.
For over a year, I have continued to predict that, much like the Nuggets, Biden and the Democrats will win this election late. That’s in part because they will do whatever it takes: lawfare, imprisoning Trump, Big Tech censorship, Big Media disinformation, ballot harvesting, and a massive, highly organized ground game. Most importantly, they will park their votes early, leaving time and energy to get out the reluctant voter.
The 2024 election will not be won on Election Day, November 5, but on the first day of early voting in every state with early voting, which only New Hampshire and Alabama do not have. Early voting in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania starts on September 16. If the GOP had its act together, all Trump voters in the commonwealth would bank their votes that week. Those not yet voting would be contacted the following week to ensure they vote immediately. The same strategy would be deployed in all the other early-voting states. Ads would start in July to ensure all voters see them.
Team Trump, however, is not organized nor savvy enough to do that job. Diehard Trump voters go to rallies. They wear their funny hats. They trash talk on social media, especially on their home team platform, Truth Social. But their robust enthusiasm is not rigorously translated into a vote-getting machine. Trump voters are a ragtag collection of individualists. They have no practice in vote-tracking or voter follow-up. They forget that a vote from a listless, apathetic voter counts as much as a vote from a rabidly gung-ho one. Elections are won by getting out both the base and the unenthused voter.
I don't like that savvy Democrats turned Election Day into Election Season––it destroys the beautiful patriotism of Americans coming together on one day––but this is how the game is now played. Though every Trump voter needs to vote the FIRST day they can, they won’t. They will talk about it, but most will not do it because, deep down, they are divided among themselves and about their standard-bearer. As Smiley said of Karla, the fanatic always carries a secret doubt. Trumpers have been so propagandized about “election integrity” that they retain lingering doubts their vote will be counted unless they pull a lever on Election Day. This view will be as lethal in 2024 as it was in 2022 and 2000.
Also, most Trumpers wouldn’t know how to help even if they wanted to. Democrats keep records of their dependable voters and maintain regular contact with them, so when elections come around, these voters know where to volunteer. The GOP, by contrast, is aloof, noncommital, divided, and dismissive. When I moved back to Nebraska, Democrats—before their Trump derangement litmus test for candidates—recruited me hard to run for political office. I only heard discouraging words from members of the GOP. That is not how you expand your base! It’s as if Republicans would rather be ideologically pure than successful. We see that with the MAGA faithful, who would prefer to fall back on the claim that an election was “stolen” than do the granular work of going deep into enemy territory and winning by so vast a margin that Democrat shenanigans––which they admit to––matter not.
Absent a prodigious, thorough, and relentless ground game, Trump’s best hope is to lie low and let Biden keep flailing. In short, run with the Democratic strategy against Trump from 2020. During the 2020 COVID panic, Trump's unnecessary and distracting appearance at daily pressers rendered him overexposed and voters unnerved. Throw in his dysregulated first debate performance, and he was toast. Shell-shocked voters preferred the sleepy guy in the Delaware basement.
This cycle, the more exposure voters have to Biden, the more they long for the safety and security of the pre-COVID Trump years when the world was not on fire. But Trump is not self-aware enough to grasp that the Dem-imposed judicial muzzle is HELPING him. Between trial dates, his goal should be to continue visiting bodegas, restaurants, and other small businesses crushed by Bidenflation and Democrat Defund the Police insanity. Trump should throw only the occasional shock jock rally. He must be sane, measured, policy-specific, and focused on recruiting volunteers for the make-or-break final push. No more talk of the rigged 2020 election, no ad hominems, and no grievances about judges, prosecutors, and witnesses. There are swing, independent, and Haley voters (who still represent over 20% of the GOP electorate in recent primaries) to recruit. Let them miss the good old days of 2016-2019 when inflation was low, yet employment was high, the world was not at war, and the Dem-enabled border debacle was getting solved.
Trump, however, lacks the discipline to follow that script. Like the Lakers at their worst, he will play hero ball, throw up wild shots, turn the ball over, and whine at the refs instead of fighting for loose balls, taking charges, and sharing the rock.
Even though I live in the crucial purple district of Nebraska CD-2, no Trump campaign staffer has ever knocked on my door. I get random GOP text bombs because I dared to donate to Jeff Fortenberry’s legal defense, but that’s just lazy. And it alienates more than it motivates.
Polls show that black male voters, for instance, are there for the taking. They are upset about Bidenflation, illegal immigrants taking jobs, housing, and benefits, and nanny-state Karens telling them how to think and vote. They want out. But is the GOP, let alone Team Trump, sending in battalions of volunteers to knock on doors in black neighborhoods? Nope. Democrats are. And forget about grassroots recruiting of black conservative candidates. As rising MAGA star Siaka Massaquoi informed me, the GOP waits until you are either famous or self-financed. Then, it puts money and resources behind you. Even then, it runs you through its radically restrictive and self-defeating abortion gauntlet.
Massive rallies don’t mean much unless you use them to recruit and train volunteers to do the grunt work that wins elections. These and other anecdotal signs tell me that Trump will lose on a fourth-quarter Denver-style comeback he didn’t see coming, he was not prepared to repel, and that came to fruition because Trump failed to build party unity, fund a scrappy and courageous ground game, train a big tent bench, and do the little things needed to win against an indomitable if weakened foe.
Good writing, and I think your point is directionally valid, but you sound too definitive here. It's true that the Dems are better at this stuff. But wasn't that also true in 2016? I think they've always been better at it.
The Republican base has gotten somewhat dumber since then, I suppose, as educated suburban voters have shifted D. But I would expect the electoral machinery to lag the base in this regard.
Maybe, as you point out, early voting has changed the game and given the Dems a tool to durably expand their edge. But do you know for a fact that it's public information that someone has already early voted and that parties can use that information? Does this perhaps vary by state? I'm really not sure, though if the rules do vary by state, that would be very relevant knowledge to have.
I also think if the Dems lose minority support, that makes all their efforts harder. I think one reason their get-out-the-vote efforts are so effective is that historically, every black person they can get to submit a ballot translates almost 1:1 to a vote for them. It also helps that their target demographic often lives in concentrated areas, in urban neighborhoods. I have to think it's harder, just logistically, to round up the votes of aging rural whites. So if Dems' black support starts to slip, or if blacks just become a little less responsive to D get-out-the-vote efforts and more inclined to stay home, then that's an automatic penalty to D efforts, even if the Rs can't actually convince any of them to vote their way.
In short, I think Nate Silver is correct that Trump would probably win if the race were held today but that Biden will close that gap over the next several months and make this race much tighter, if not lean D, and the organizational advantage you describe is one reason for it. But by all appearances, to extend your b-ball metaphor, this one will still come down to the buzzer.
Great response. I do sound a bit definitive. And Trump could pull it out, but it won't be because he played like the Denver Nuggets. It will be because the Democrats failed to do what they do so well: close hard. I would be more bullish on Trump if he was up by 10% in key swing states. That might be too prohibitive a cushion for even the Democratic Machine to overcome. But he is not. He has built-in negatives that cannot be overcome. His VP pick could ameliorate some but not most of it.
In truth, the Republicans during the Karl Rove years had a tremendous ground game. They were strategic. They knew where to find new and reluctant voters. And they knew what specific local ballot initiatives would drive select voters in select states to the polls. I disliked Rove, Cheney, and the Bushes. I will never forgive them for the deceitfully sold Iraq War. Their use of homophobic ballot initiatives was quite cynical and wrong. But they played the game well, with intelligence and finesse. In his war on "Low Energy Jeb" and the NeoCon GOP establishment, Trump lost all that know-how. If he brought the NeoCons back in, they would try to sabotage him anyway, as they did during his first term. Their allegiance is not to party or country, but to the military-industrial complex and forever wars, which Trump opposed. So Trump has to wing it.
The Dems have not even used their real powder yet. They've softened up the target through lawfare, media disinformation, and Big Tech dominance. They kept the game close. Now they will close with an avalanche of negative advertising, phone calls, text assaults, and door-to-door canvassers. Campaigns have access to voter databases: their registered party, and their donations to public officials. That's enough to put together the lists the Dems need. Plus who knows what the Dems are up to with AI. They are always a step ahead and they play together when it counts.
Trump's better polling with Hispanics could spell the difference in Arizona and Nevada. But winning over sufficient urban blacks in PA and MI is going to be tough. He will win some, but that gain will be offset by his losses among suburban women on the abortion question, even though Trump is sane and moderate on the issue.
I have seen the script before. Trump is up in polls, with tremendous enthusiasm among his base, only to disappoint when it counted. And that's due to all the problems I articulated, which by his public rhetoric he seems uninterested in changing. The key to winning in any sport is the ability to make adjustments on the fly. The GOP in this era is always one step behind.