His image, public pronouncements and continuous clashes with the law do not seem to correspond to the figure of the fine strategist, but it is clear that Donald John Trump has a plan to try to recover the White House in November of next year. He will hardly have read an entire book throughout his adult life and his forte is not exactly studying and filing documents – one only has to look at where he kept the papers he took with him to Mar-a-Lago – but, endowed with With a huge audiovisual appetite, he perfectly knows the intricacies of his country’s complex and archaic electoral system.
You should know, for example, that it is practically impossible for you to have a majority of popular votes at the national level. Having voted for him about three million fewer Americans than Hillary Clinton in 2016 and about seven million fewer than Joe Biden in 2020, he is going too far to try to bridge those differences. In the best of cases, he can aspire to regain the trust of the 74.2 million who voted for him two and a half years ago, but not much more.
Therefore, his strategy is clear: on the one hand, demobilize a part of the 81.2 million who opted for Biden and, on the other, concentrate on the half dozen states that can give him victory in the Electoral College. . For the first, it seems demonstrated that the scorched earth policy, that of questioning the country’s institutions, from Congress to judges and prosecutors, from the FBI to the Department of Justice, can contribute to reducing participation. If he also manages to get the state legislatures dominated by the Republican Party to contribute to making it more difficult to exercise the vote, that’s hunky-dory. Trump himself has claimed that if mail-in voting became widespread, the Republican Party would never win a presidential election again.
The other leg of the strategy is more intricate and beyond the scope of this article, but two examples will suffice to illustrate it (and neither is reassuring for the Democratic Party). Just a decade ago, two states as different and distant as Ohio and Florida were competitive (swing states), that is, they could fall on either side. Well, while the Democrat Barack Obama was able to prevail in both states on the two occasions that he ran, the Republican Donald Trump did so on the following two occasions and it does not seem that Joe Biden manages to reverse that trend. The reasons are diverse. Crudely simplifying, it could be said that, in the case of Florida, the most recent Latino immigration is very conservative –the usual Cuban has been added, among others, wealthy Venezuelans, Colombians and Nicaraguans–, while in Ohio the voter proliferates without higher education, affected by deindustrialization and reluctant to digitalization, more prone to Trump’s populist message.
It is true that other states, such as Arizona or Georgia, also for various reasons that it would take too long to describe, seem to be going in the opposite direction, and Joe Biden won in both, albeit narrowly, in 2020. But things change a lot. , or the key will once again reside in Midwestern states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump’s victory was won in 2016 and Biden’s in 2020. There is a party, a lot of party and, meanwhile, a lot of court appearances of Trump and the occasional cost of Biden…
