This is a real problem for Donald Trump
One considerable advantage that Democrats have going into the 2024 election that they didn’t have in 2016 (or even 2012, for that matter) is a sizable number of important surrogates campaigning in all of the pivotal swing states they’ll need to win. There’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan (a strong politician and already a political rising star), as well as Tony Evers in Wisconsin and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, a critical advantage for helping re-elect President Biden while electing Democrats up and down the ballot.
Gov. Shapiro already used his position as surrogate when talking about the outcome of the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday night. Even though Nikki Haley has been out of the race for nearly two months, she still got over 155,000 votes in a closed Republican primary. The Keystone State is one of the most pivotal in the election, so it should be troubling that even with the nomination wrapped up, more Republicans turned out to vote against Donald Trump than the number of voters he won that state by back in 2016. More voted against him in fact, than the number of votes Joe Biden won the state by in 2020.
It gets worse when you consider that even with President Biden running for the Democratic nomination unopposed, he managed to get more votes than Donald Trump – with President Biden even getting more votes from rural counties in the state than the former guy did. Shapiro knows why this pattern has been playing out again and again: Donald Trump has overturned Roe v. Wade and taken credit for it, and he’s doing nothing to make inroads with voters he’s lost. Let’s make sure he does lose by putting in the work now and building up President Biden’s path to reelection.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making