NOT SO FAST (CORRECTED)

The first two primary elections of the year are behind us, the Republican caucus in Iowa, and the primary election in New Hampshire and both have resulted in large, double digit, victories for Donald Trump. The next primary will be held in South Carolina on February 3, where polls indicate that Trump has a 63% lead, with Nevada, where Trump will run virtually uncontested, following on February 6. If not before, the Republican primary contest is likely to be decided on March 5, Super Tuesday, when 17 State primaries will be held, including the major ones in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. With the Republican primary reduced to a two-candidate race, Donald Trump versus Nikki Haley, Trump has a 45-point advantage over his remaining opponent in the remaining State primaries and, at this time, it appears that all Trump must do to secure the Republican nomination is staying alive and out of jail.

Counterintuitively, the overwhelming appearance of dominance and inevitability of a Trump victory in the primaries does not translate in a repeat pattern for the general election in November. A look into the numbers behind Trump’s big wins in Iowa and New Hampshire provides the first reason why the predictive value of these wins for the Presidential election in November is minimal, if not zero.

If we look at the Iowa caucus first, we see that Trump only collected 56,260 votes from 752,200 registered Republican voters in the State. The vast majority of Republicans stayed home (the weather was nasty) and of the 110,298 voters who came out, Trump collected only 51% of their votes. In other words, 49% of the Republican voters in the Iowa caucus preferred someone else than Trump as their nominee for the presidency.

In New Hampshire the results for Trump were not much better. While among registered Republicans Trump trounced Nikki Haley by 74% versus 25%, with registered Independents the roles were reversed with Haley collecting 64% of the votes against Trump with 35%. As much as Trump ended up winning the New Hampshire Republican primary by 54% of the vote, the numbers show that 25% of Republican voters refused to vote for him and that among registered Independents he was trounced by Nikki Haley. Independents represented 44% of the votes cast in the New Hampshire primary. According to the exit polls, 6% of the voters were self-declared Democrats and 95% of them voted for Haley. 35% of the Haley voters said that they would not vote for Trump in the general election.

We need to keep in mind that we were witnessing Republican pre-elections here and that Trumps opponents in these contests were other Republican candidates. Democrats are essentially out of the picture, other than that in a number of States they are allowed to vote in Republican primaries. But there are no Democrats to vote for in these elections.

The way to look at the results in Iowa and New Hampshire is that ten months ahead of the general election Trump has the uncontested support of only 50-75% of Republican voters and no more than 35% of Independent voters.

Donald Trump collected roughly 74 million votes in his 2020 race against Joe Biden, who collected roughly 81 million votes. In the likely repeat contest for 2024 he cannot afford to lose any part of the electorate that came out for him in 2020. In that election only 6% of Registered Republicans voted against him. Even though many Republican voters who voted against him in the primaries may vote for him when their choice is between Trump or Biden, he really cannot afford to lose any of them (by staying home or voting for someone else) if he wants to do better against Biden in 2024 than he did in 2020. Similarly, he cannot afford to lose the support of any of the 41% of Independents who voted for him in 2020.

That’s why I’m saying: Not So Fast! Trump has surely conquered any Republican opposition. He has consolidated his base and his vise grip on the Republican party. But, to what avail?

If you, like I do, believe that a resounding Trump defeat in the 2024 Presidential election is required to preserve the constitutional republican democracy in America, you can find solace in the numbers beneath the primary results and in the following facts and likelihoods:

·      Trump on top of the Republican ticket has yet to prove a winning proposition. He would most likely not have made it to the White House in 2016 if Hillary Clinton had seriously campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin, Jim Comey had not made a last-minute about face and Russia had not interfered in our elections.

·        He has centered his campaign on revenge and retribution, ingratiating his MAGA base but alienating about everybody else. He does not seem to realize that he starts off with a 7 million vote deficit and would need to expand his support base.

·        His legal challenges, including one or more possible criminal convictions ahead of Election Day, will impact his chances negatively.

·        His record and campaign rhetoric will cast the upcoming election as a contest between constitutional republican democracy and populist authoritarianism and only fools bet against deep seated democratic values instilled in the American voting public.

·        Wild cards are the age, health, and cognitive capacities of the contenders who are both well over the age of prime performance and, relatedly, the turnout of the young vote.