Converts and New Additions to the Trump Train

In 2016, President Trump received more votes than any Republican presidential candidate in American history.  In spite of his strong showing, his Democratic opponent managed to win even more votes.  Unfortunately for her, the national popular vote does not determine who becomes President in the United States of America.  The Electoral College does.  Hillary Clinton’s massive margin of victory in California put her over the top in the national popular vote but it did not enable her to win the Electoral College.  President Trump won the presidency by beating her in the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; which Republicans had not carried in decades.  As a result of Hillary Clinton’s failure to win the presidency despite winning the popular vote, the debate about abolishing the Electoral College has reached a fever pitch.  The idea has almost become a sort of litmus test among the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders. 

One can certainly understand why the Democrats want to get rid of the Electoral College.  In every Presidential Election since 1988 but one, the Democrats’ raw total in the popular vote has increased.  Even Hillary Clinton could not manage to match President Obama’s vote total in 2008, which exceeded 69 million.  While Republican vote totals have increased in every election with the exceptions of 1992 and 2008, Republicans have found themselves unable to keep up with the Democrats because as Ann Coulter pointed out, “every day…thousands of immigrants turn 18 and start block voting for the Democrats while thousands of traditional Americans die off.” In addition to the demographic changes that secured the Democrats’ final vote tally in 2016, many people who would normally vote for a Republican presidential candidate chose not to vote for President Trump in 2016; keeping his nationwide popular vote total down. Most, if not all of the roughly 750,000 votes that went for the Bill Kristol-backed “Better for America” candidate Evan McMuffin would have gone to the Republican presidential candidate if the candidate had a name other than Donald J. Trump. Fortunately, some of the people who would not support President Trump in 2016 have come around.  While many of President Trump’s supporters have likely died, thus making them unable to vote for him in 2020, a new group of enthusiastic Trump supporters will have reached voting age by November 3, 2020.  In honor of President Trump’s 73^rd birthday, I have decided to give him a birthday present consisting of an incomplete list of people who could not or would not support him in 2016 who will cast their ballots for him in 2020. 

Lindsey Graham: South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham epitomizes the GOP foreign policy establishment.  He ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 but ended up dropping out before Christmas 2015.  Graham frequently found himself the target of the frontrunner, Donald Trump, who revealed his cell phone number to the public and frequently ridiculed him for his horrendous poll numbers. After he dropped out of the race, Graham got behind former Florida Governor Jeb Bush; who ended up withdrawing himself after showing poorly in the South Carolina primary.  By the middle of March 2016, only three candidates remained: Trump, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich. Graham made it clear that he disapproved of the trajectory of the Republican primary, once comparing the idea of choosing between Cruz and Trump to choosing “death by being shot or poisoning” and bemoaning that the party “has gone batsh** crazy.”  By the end of the first week of May 2016, President Trump had clinched the Republican nomination.  Many people who had previously opposed President Trump, including former Louisiana Governor and 2016 presidential candidate Bobby Jindal, had announced that they would support him.  Graham did not.  Graham ended up supporting McMuffin, who only made the ballot in a handful of states; including Graham’s home state of South Carolina. 

How things have changed.  Graham has emerged as one of the President’s most stalwart supporters, especially in the wake of the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.  Graham, who had supported both of President Obama’s nominees to the Supreme Court, gave a firy speech before the Senate Judiciary Committee scorching the Democrats for orchestrating “the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics” by rolling out increasingly implausible allegations against Kavanaugh at the eleventh hour in an attempt to torpedo his nomination.  Graham has spent his entire career attempting to give the Democrats the benefit of the doubt, especially when it comes to immigration and the judicial branch.  Just a decade ago, as Republicans treated President Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor with utmost respect, Graham expressed his hope that “if we ever get a conservative president and they nominate someone who has an equal passion on the other side, that we will not forget this moment.” As the Kavanaugh fiasco showed, Graham’s sunny optimism did not pan out.

Graham’s vote will probably make little difference in the outcome of the presidential race in his state.  President Trump remains a strong favorite to win the Palmetto State’s nine electoral votes. 

Brandon Straka: It should come as a surprise to no one that a gay liberal who lives in New York City cried on election night 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost the election.  However, Brandon Straka began opening his eyes to the deceptive tactics of the left and the mainstream media; a journey which culminated in him becoming a Trump supporter and founding the “Walk Away” movement; which “encourages and supports those on the Left to walk away from the divisive tenets endorsed and mandated by the Democratic Party of today.” Straka has even toyed with the idea of running against the darling of the left, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Unlike Graham, who did not vote for Hillary Clinton, Straka’s support for President Trump means one less vote for the Democratic nominee in 2020 and one more vote for President Trump.

Maddie Mueller: This high school student in California probably would have voted for President Trump in 2016 but she did not meet the Constitutional requirement to vote, as outlined in the 26^th Amendment.  However, Mueller will have reached that requirement by 2020.  This faced disciplinary action from her school in Clovis for daring to wear a Make America Great Again hat on campus. According to Mueller, school officials told her she could not wear the hat because it “wasn’t a school hat or a hat from a school club or activity.” During an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Mueller called B.S. on that argument, noting that liberal students faced no pushback for wearing hats supportive of Bernie Sanders and/or wearing apparel supportive of the LGBTQ movement.  While Mueller’s vote will have little influence on the outcome of the presidential contest in California, her vote might make a difference at the Congressional level.  Mueller’s high school, Clovis North, is located in Devin Nunes’ Congressional district. While the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has not targeted Nunes’s district this time around, he only won re-election by five points as four of his six fellow Republicans in the California Congressional delegation won re-election by larger margins. 

CJ Pearson:  A few years ago, young conservative CJ Pearson first began making You Tube videos.  While he flirted with socialism and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for a brief period of time, Pearson has now firmly jumped on board the Trump train.  While his commentary certainly provides encouragement for those convinced that the younger generation amounts to nothing more than zombies, Pearson has had little ability to influence democracy by voting.  That will change by the time Election Day 2020 rolls around; when Pearson will have reached the age of 18.  Pearson resides in Georgia, which has voted Republican in the last several elections but that Democrats have their eyes on flipping over the long term. 

Kyle Kashuv: While America found itself subject to the commentary of high school student and gun control supporter David Hogg following a shooting at his high school in South Florida, one of his fellow students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School took a different approach.  Kashuv resisted the urges of many of his classmates to use the tragedy as an excuse to push for gun control and has drawn ire for his staunch support of the Second Amendment.  Of all of the people named on this list, Kashuv resides in a state most essential to President Trump’s re-election bid: Florida.  While Kashuv lives in a district that votes Democratic, every vote counts when it comes to capturing Florida’s 29 electoral votes.

While the media would probably dismiss this article as nothing more than a list of anecdotal examples, these anecdotal examples will translate into real votes in the 2020 Presidential Election. After all, many more people just like Senator Graham, Brandon Straka, Maddie Mueller, CJ Pearson, and Kyle Kashuv exist throughout the United States of America.  The mainstream media have spent the past week in particular trying to make the case that President Trump will get crushed in his re-election bid next year; specifically by pointing to a poll from Quinnipiac University showing President Trump losing to all of his potential Democratic challengers.

Brad Pascale, President Trump’s re-election campaign manager, has collected data that tell a slightly different story. Parscale told Axios that of all the people who attended President Trump’s rally in El Paso back in February, “an estimated 50% of the roughly 30,000 people who registered online were Democrats, 25% were swing voters and 25% were Republicans.” Parscale obtained this information because “people registering for the rally submitted a phone number when they requested tickets, and that information was used to match the person with party voting data.”

Barring catastrophe, President Trump should carry Texas in 2020.  However, statewide opinion polling has shown President Trump underwater in Michigan; one of the states crucial to his 2016 victory. However, information obtained from Parscale’s impressive collection of data showed that “more than a third of the crowd of the crowd at President Trump’s…campaign-style rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, consisted of Democrats.” According to The Epoch Times, “Parscale told Fox News that he’s harvesting ‘nearly a million voters’ data information in key swing states each month.” 

While the doom and gloom predicted by the media and the polls may not come to fruition, President Trump should not take all of this positive news for granted. While he has united the Republican Party by securing approval ratings among GOP voters in the high 80s and low 90s and convincing elected officials who voted against him in 2016 such as Graham, Cory Gardner, and Rob Portman to support him in 2020, President Trump has no reason to become complacent; especially because of his poor approval ratings among independents. Also, if all of the liberal voters who either supported the Green Party in 2016, wrote in a candidate and/or stayed home on Election Day in 2016 show up to vote for the Democratic nominee in 2020, that could make all of the difference in the outcome of the presidential race if President Trump does not add to his vote totals in the three states that made him President.  Nonetheless, all of the converts and new additions to the Trump train will definitely come in handy as the President begins to assemble and expand the coalition that will give him four more years in the White House.