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Are You Sick and Tired of All the Winning Yet?
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The Triad

Are You Sick and Tired of All the Winning Yet?

Please, please, it’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore.

Jonathan V. Last's avatar
Jonathan V. Last
Feb 14, 2024
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Are You Sick and Tired of All the Winning Yet?
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Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump gestures to members of the audience as he leaves a Get Out The Vote rally at Coastal Carolina University on February 10, 2024 in Conway, South Carolina. South Carolina holds its Republican primary on February 24. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

1. So Much Winning

Pretend for a moment that there is no polling on Trump vs. Biden. Instead, what you have is the following fact set:

  • In 2016, Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2.1 points.

  • In 2018, Republicans lost both the House and the Senate.

  • In 2020, Joe Biden beat an incumbent president and got more votes than anyone in American history. This time, Trump lost the popular vote by more than 4 points.

  • Beginning in 2021, Biden passed an extraordinary amount of popular, bipartisan legislation.

  • In 2022, Biden defied recent midterm election trends and gained ground in the Senate while only losing a handful of seats in the House.

  • The economy has avoided what many predicted would be a recession and is now “truly excellent.”

  • Democrats won the off-year elections in New Jersey and recaptured the state assembly in Virginia.

  • In 2023 special elections, Democrats have been killing it—outperforming partisan leans in 38 races by an average of +10.

  • In the most recent special election in NY03, Democrats flipped another Republican seat in a race that the GOP thought it could win. The Democrat saw a +16 point swing over the district’s 2022 result.

  • Meanwhile, Trump is bouncing back and forth between courthouses in four separate criminal trials, facing 91 felony counts, and in at least one of those trials everyone admits that Trump is dead to rights.

Looking at all of that, be honest: Don’t you start to feel a little bit like this guy?


Now: We do have polling and we know what the polling says.

But that polling doesn’t make any objective sense. I’m not saying the polling is wrong: It’s real and I believe it.

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