“They don’t have a narrative that they’re comfortable with about how to take down Harris,” said Chuck Coughlin, an Arizona-based political strategist. “He’s grasping around. I think he’s desperately grasping around with his instincts. I don’t think his team has any way to put their handle on this, and so he’s instinctually grasping around for what to say.”
The Trump machine had in recent days begun a multi-million-dollar TV advertising blitz hammering Harris for her record on the border, an issue the former president’s campaign sees as a winner — and portraying her as ideologically out of the mainstream. One ad from a pro-Trump group labeled the vice president a “dangerous San Francisco liberal.”
Harris had even begun defending herself from the attacks, hitting back Tuesday night in Atlanta about her border record, and simultaneously releasing a nearly minute-long video framing her as pro-border security.
But Trump’s comments Wednesday on Harris’ racial background drew some of the biggest gasps from the audience, and provided Democrats with ammunition. During the appearance, Trump said Harris “happen[ed] to turn Black … She was Indian all the way and all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black woman.”
I said they have an advantage. Not an insurmountable one.
It’s not for nothing that the Republicans have only won the popular vote in the presidential election once in the last 25 years, and yet we’ve had three Republican presidential terms.
But one of those times was due to a SCOTUS decision over Florida ballots. Gore would have won even with the electoral college if that bogus decision hadn’t been made. So you need to discount the 2000 election in that list if you’re talking about an EC advantage. Really, you can only go with Trump in 2016 at that point.
Even with the vote count the SC ratified, Bush still didn’t win the popular vote in 2000.
It still wasn’t an EC issue that got him elected.
It was, though. Just one that was exacerbated by the Supreme Court.
The Electoral College is the reason the Supreme Court even mattered in that election. If it wasn’t for them, the vote count in Florida would not have been instrumental to the final decision. Gore’s lead would have been too great for it to matter.