Trump’s Re-election Strategy

“Trump is stupid.” “He is a political numbnuts.” “Any Democrat will wipe the floor with him in 2020.” Perhaps so. But looking behind the curtain, one realizes that there is a method to the orangeman’s madness. Let’s try to understand how Trump is angling to stay in the White House for four more years.

First, what is the second largest voting block? White men represent about 32% of all voters and Trump carried them in 2016 bigly. This should be about the same percentage as all minority groups combined ... see: Pew Research Study. Yes, white women represent a slightly higher percentage of voters than white men but they didn’t vote against Trump in 2016. In fact he won white women by 53% to 47% ... see: The Undefeated.  Yes, many pundits believe that Trump is losing suburban white women’s support. Perhaps so ... but most of this defection would be in states that Trump is unlikely to carry anyway.

Therefore, Trump’s re-election centers oh white voters, particularly white men voters ... a minority that Democrats have ignored in their rapt attention to other minorities. Yes, his opposition senses this strategy and labels it “white supremacy” ... but was the Democrat’s past obsession with African-American voters called “black supremacy?”

Anyhow, Trump’s focusing on middle American white voters does not mean he is ignoring minorities. He constantly refers to how his economic policies have helped them. And his criminal reform efforts and economic development zones are also directed at helping non-whites.

But, to me, his rallies suggest to me that the enthusiasm among his voter base is enough to carry him to an Electoral College victory once again. What is not widely known is that at these oversubscribed rallies, names and contact information are collected to help with the Republican’s get-out-the-vote efforts late next year. The only real enthusiasm on the left seems to be among the radical left as exemplified by the Squad. This can’t be good news for the Dems ... unless they nominate Ilhan Omar ... or Michelle Obama.

For the Want of a Nail

Why did Mitt Romney lose an election which most pundits thought he was sure to win (including myself … a non- pundit). Other than the voting loyalty of obvious major blocs that worshiped at the feet of Obama -- single women, Hispanics and blacks, Romney may well of lost because his team could not get out the vote. In fact in 2012, the Romney/Ryan ticket received 464 thousand fewer votes than the McCain/Palin ticket did in 2008. This was a shocker to me … particularly given the surge that Romney and Ryan seemed to be receiving in the waning days of the campaign.

When you couple this with another surprising statistic – the Obama/Biden ticket got almost 6.3 million fewer votes than they did in 2008, one is even more perplexed. Obviously something was seriously wrong with both candidates’s ground games, but Romney had an opening through which he could have driven an American Motors car … and he flubbed the dub. If he just could have picked up half the votes that Obama surrendered, he might well have been elected. But alas, not to be.

The question then is, what happened? And I think I have a little-reported answer. The Romney/Ryan team was depending on a piece of software dubbed ORCA to get out those voters that were expected to and should have pulled the Republican levers. This software was supposed to identify for more than 34,000 eager Romney poll-watchers specific names of those voters in key districts who needed to be rounded up and brought to the polls. However, this lauded software pooped the bed and did not perform as anticipated. And what is worse, the Romney team had no back-up plan … so perhaps millions of their expected Republican voters stayed home and watched the sad results on television … see: National Journal Article

Exactly why this software crashed to the point of non-functionality on election day is probably now being hotly debated … lack of beta testing, lack of user training, insufficient computer power, a denial-of-service attack from the Obama team, a Democrat techie mole, etc.; but what is clear is that Romney, despite his reputation for getting things done, did not have the right techies and technical managers on his campaign staff. See: SD Times Article for additional details. Too bad … for all Romney’s psychic and organizational efforts and the hundreds of millions of dollars that were expended on his behalf … the lack of this one I.P. nail may well have cost him the election battle.