US Presidential Election: Why Donald Trump will eventually lose the 2024 election

Donald Trump posing for his official portrait at The White House, in Washington, D.C., on October 6, 2017. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons)

Donald Trump has comfortably won the first two Republican Party state primaries leading up to the nomination of the party’s candidate in the US presidential election to be held in November this year. There is only one other person left in the fray now—Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and US ambassador to the United Nations when Trump was in the White House. All others have dropped out.

In the US political system, parties conduct primaries in all states to choose the candidate party members deem to be best suited to run for president. The procedures vary between parties and from state to state. For example, unlike most other states, New Hampshire allows independents as well as Republicans to vote in the party primary.

Unless there is a black swan event in the coming months, it is almost certain that Trump will be the Republican presidential candidate. And it is also very likely that he will lose to the octogenarian Joe Biden.

Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans do not believe that Biden any longer has the cognitive ability to be president. In fact, an August 2023 CNN poll found that a stunning 82 percent of Democrats/ Democratic-leaning independents preferred “just someone besides Joe Biden” as the party’s nominee. But the die is cast. Biden is the nominee.

Why will Trump lose? The simple answer is that the number of Americans who hate him is very large—and it does not matter whether they think Biden is fit for a second term.

In the New Hampshire primary, Trump’s vote share was 54.3 percent, and Haley’s 43.2. But 60 percent of independents voted for Haley. This is a significant statistic. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, 28 percent of American voters identify themselves as Republicans and another 17 percent as Republic-leaning independents. The corresponding figures for the Democratic Party are about the same.

Trump cannot win without the votes of the Republic-leaning independents. They may have no love lost for Biden, but if many of them decide to stay home on election day simply because they do not want Trump back, his fate is sealed. There is also a small but significant number of “never-Trumper” Republicans, who would rather die than vote for him. And many Democrat-leaning independents, even if they are fed up with the current president, will probably vote for Biden only to defeat Trump.

The obvious strategy for Trump is to reassure and woo independents who support his party or even the other one. In the 2016 election, the independent vote may have been a key factor in his victory. More independents opted for him than for Hillary Clinton. But this time, Trump may be pushing many of them away with his erratic and generally nasty behaviour.

Most of his victory speech after the New Hampshire primary was pure abuse directed at Haley. Many swing voters who had not made up their minds yet about Trump would have been appalled. On many occasions during his current campaign, he has come across as a man unhinged by megalomania, pure hatred for anyone who disagrees with him and an insatiable thirst for revenge.

Of course, he has reason to feel aggrieved. Throughout his presidency, he was hounded by accusations from Democrats and the liberal mainstream media that he was a Russian “asset”. In the end, no evidence was found to prove this. Instead, evidence was found that senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) may have helped spread the theory.

A week before the 2020 election, the newspaper New York Post published a report on mail exchanges and documents allegedly found on the hard drive of a laptop that then-presidential candidate Biden’s son Hunter had mislaid. The data suggested that Hunter had made millions of dollars in dubious deals with shady Chinese and Ukrainian companies when his father, Joe Biden, was vice-president. The FBI got social media companies to black out the story. If allowed normal exposure, the revelations could have made a difference to the final election result. We now know that the information in the Post story was correct.

The Biden administration and Democratic Party-run state governments have also lodged several criminal cases against Trump, all of which, he claims, are politically motivated. Two states are even trying to take Trump off the presidential ballot altogether.

So it is not surprising that Trump feels that he is a victim of Washington DC’s entrenched political system, what he called “the swamp” in his 2016 presidential campaign and which he vowed “to drain”. But his daily ranting and tasteless social media posts attacking any and everybody, including leaders of his own party, are not helping his cause much, except of course among his committed followers, many of whom, in any case, believe he was the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president. This, when Joe Biden has many chinks in his armour.

Under Biden, the mighty American army fled Afghanistan in 2021, chased by sandal-wearing Taliban militia. Inflation has been high, at least partly due to the government’s huge spending spree. The country faces a very serious illegal migrant crisis on its southern border. Much of the education system, from kindergartens to universities, seems to have been captured by radical wokes, causing deep social fissures. More than a hundred billion dollars of taxpayer money has been spent as aid to Ukraine for a war that Ukraine, as things stand, is definitely not winning. Then there is the Hunter Biden thing.

Joe Biden has also appeared disoriented, even incoherent, at times, during his public appearances.

Yet, the people who supposedly comprise what Trump called the “swamp” are comfortable with Biden. Imagine, for a moment, that Trump’s accusations are true. Wouldn’t the swamp want an old man with declining physical and mental health whom they can easily manipulate in the White House? If he goes, Kamala Harris might become president. She is hardly a rocket scientist and does not seem to have any particular belief or ideology other than personal ambition.

The Democratic Party has figured out, cleverly enough, that Trump can be used as the most effective campaigner for Biden. In fact, it wants Trump to be the Republican candidate because it is easy to paint him as a monster because of his own reckless conduct. Mainstream US media, almost all of which is fervidly anti-Trump, will trumpet the message.

The strategy appears to be that Biden will not go on a full-fledged nation-wide campaign, nor will he take part in any presidential debate, because these could expose his age-related and other weaknesses. He will stick to his already light work schedule and will be kept away from too many public appearances, while Trump rampages all over the country making wild accusations and alienating voters.

The basic question that Biden’s campaign will ask is: Wouldn’t you rather have a slightly dotty old man as your president than someone who goes around saying offensive things all the time and no one knows who or what will be his next target?

Unless Trump stops raging and projects himself as a reasonable and reliable person, the “swamp” that he accuses of scuppering him may very well win again. The principal reason for Biden’s victory in 2020 was that he was “not Trump”. That same attribute could get him a second term.