Pic Of The Moment: Putting That Trump Iowa Landslide In Perspective

[EarlG]

14. In my defense, of course it's spin

I don't do fake news -- there are no lies in the image, the figures are correct. But I spin!

Trump was obviously going to win Iowa, and is obviously going to win the Republican nomination, by a significant margin. He'll be Biden's opponent. I still think it's fair to point out that Trump's record margin of victory in Iowa happened during a record low turnout. Yeah the weather was bad. But this is Trump's cult we're talking about here. Big landslide victories against other Republicans in the primaries won't mean much in the general *if* overall Republican enthusiasm for Trump is low. Of course it remains to be seen if this is the case, but the Iowa numbers don't bode well for the GOP at large. In fact they suggest that if anything, it might be Republicans that have a complacency problem.

I don't think that arguments about Democratic complacency in 2016 really translate over to 2024. Dems were blindsided in 2016 -- we thought we had it in the bag, and that was a big mistake. Trump was essentially an unknown quantity, a political outsider running a completely unprecedented campaign, and he managed to persuade just enough leaners to give him a chance to see what he could do -- one of his campaign pitches was, "What do you have to lose?"

But he wasn't able to persuade those same people to re-elect him in 2020, and since 2016, he has basically done nothing but cause the GOP to lose a ton of elections that they should easily have won.

Of course Trump can win in 2024. However, he is now a very known quantity, and he's weaker and more extreme than he was in 2016 and 2020. So I plan to spend the next 10 months metaphorically kicking him while he's down, rather than standing back and worrying that he might get up again