Here’s the thing everyone is missing

| 12:01 pm EST November 15, 2020
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Here’s what’s so remarkable about the 2020 election: Donald Trump ran a highly ineffective campaign, failed to expand his too-small support base, never found a way to fully pull into contention, and couldn’t even figure out how to cheat his way to victory. That’s pretty surprising, after what we saw from him in 2016 – except it’s not, because it’s exactly what we saw from him in 2016.

Trump spent the 2016 election making every rookie mistake in the book. He focused on the wrong things. He campaigned in the wrong places. His initial support base was too small, and he never figured out how to expand it. Even after he spent a year and a half conspiring with the Russians to try to rig the outcome, he was still on track to lose Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and lose the electoral college, while losing the popular vote by perhaps six million votes. Then the last minute Comey letter happened.

The Comey letter caused a two to three point shift across the board. This isn’t conjecture; we saw that shift in the final week of polling. If not for that letter, Trump would have lost the 2016 election, both in the electoral college and by about six million votes, and it would have been seen as a blowout. He’d have been laughed off the political stage. By now he’d either be in a New York prison or he’d be reduced to doing late night infomercials.

Put another way: as solid as this blowout win was for Joe Biden in 2020, if a last minute fluke like the Comey letter had shifted the polls by two to three points, Donald Trump very well could have accidentally won again despite having done absolutely nothing to pull it off. Then again, Trump accidentally won in 2016 despite having done absolutely nothing to pull it off.

Focusing solely on firing up your base is a good way to make a lot of noise, but it tends to result in getting far too few votes to compete in an election. Donald Trump was never any good at politics. Far from being some kind of campaigning genius, he was merely a one-trick pony who got lucky the first time, and didn’t get lucky the second time. It shows how much of a crapshoot presidential general elections are, and how dangerous it is when one party nominates someone who’s dangerously unfit.