66% GOP wants Trump to run in 2024, 79% say election ‘stolen’.
The belief among President Trump’s supporters that the election victory was “stolen” through fraud has surged anew, driving 66% to urge the Republican to run in 2024 if Joe Biden is certified the winner.
A new survey for the communications and messaging firm Seven Letter found that 79% of Trump supporters believe that Democrats stole the election from Trump, even more than a similar Rasmussen Reports survey last week that put the number at 75%.
And as a result, 66% of supporters want the president to run again in 2024, which he has privately vowed to do. In the survey, he outdistanced Vice President Mike Pence and his son Donald Trump Jr.
And there’s plenty to motivate them. Biden’s welcome back of Obama era swamp creatures combined with the Republicans new foothold on redistricting lays the groundwork for major gains in 2022.
And it is not too early to herald what might best be described, if not as a wave, as the Trump Undertow of 2020.
Because, like an unseen riptide, this year’s results just handed the GOP an advantage many never thought possible. And it carried far away from shore Democratic hopes and dreams.
“Wait,” you say, “Trump lost the presidency.”
Yes, he did. But Trump, even as he lost, engineered a huge win for the GOP this month, and one that will echo through American politics as our once-a-decade reapportionment fights begin.
“On the eve of reapportionment, Republicans are now in a better position than they were after 2010,” Noah Rothman noted in Commentary. “Following those elections, Republicans controlled 54 of 99 state legislative chambers.” (Nebraska’s legislature is unicameral.)
That number is now 61.
If anything, Rothman understates the impact of the GOP domination of state legislatures. After the 2010 election, congressional redistricting lived in the shadow of a Supreme Court suspicious of gerrymandering. In one 2015 case, the court upheld the redistricting maps of Arizona’s absurdly partisan “citizens’ commission” by a 5-to-4 margin. Today, two of the five justices in the majority on that case have left the court. State legislatures now may do their redistricting work free of fear of new “tests” invented by the court to strike at their maps. Indeed, commissions of the sort that design districts in California, Ohio and Virginia may not be long for the books — a never-very-popular, post-Watergate-era reform whose era is now long over.
The new Supreme Court may be revisiting its 2015 decision very soon.
In nearly two dozen states, the congressional district mapping is safely in the hands of the GOP. That’s because Trump generated huge turnout in red states as well as blue, and Republicans did well down a lot of ballots.
It is ironic that Trump’s narrow losses in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin kept him from a second consecutive term. It wasn’t a conspiracy that cost Trump the White House but a terrible combination of bad timing — the vaccines he promised were announced a fortnight too late for them to impact voting — and bad polling. Polling directs resources, locates rallies, energizes or depresses turnout. If polling tells you Wisconsin is lost, Pennsylvania is competitive and other states are safe, when none of that is accurate, the consequences are disastrous.
The party Trump leads is reluctant to tilt at legal windmills, but it is eager for answers about why no one expected so many states to finish closely or projected House Republicans to pick up seats. The headline that read “Biden leads Trump by 17 points in Wisconsin” is what I’ll never forget, nor should the pollsters, the media or the experts.
Elected Republican leaders will rightly balk at asking state legislatures to overturn popular votes — as radical a “constitutional” innovation as packing the Supreme Court, and just as repugnant to rule-of-law conservatives. But the GOP nomination in 2024 will be very much Trump’s for the taking should his health and energy remain as they are now.
Whether he runs again, Trump has reset the stage for the decennial remaking of the maps on which lawmaking at every level of government depends. It’s a proper capstone for a first term — or a last.
