The conventional wisdom was that almost any of the other 16 Republican presidential candidates could have run better than Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton's team certainly believed it.
Now that Trump is president-elect, not only was his weakness clearly exaggerated. With the benefit of hindsight, Trump may have been the only Republican contender who could have broken Clinton's blue wall and pulled off the upset.
"I wouldn't have believed it," said a D.C. anti-Trump conservative. "Now it sure seems like it."
Consider Trump's unlikely path to a majority in the Electoral College. Trump held on to every state Mitt Romney won in 2012 and managed to flip perennial battleground Florida into the Republican column. But the real difference-maker was Trump's strong performance in the industrial Midwest, giving him Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa and likely Michigan.
When all is said and done, Trump will probably receive 306 electoral votes. Which of his primary opponents could have accomplished what House Speaker Paul Ryan described as an "enormous" and "incredible political feat" by replicating his huge rural white voter turnout or replacing it with other voting blocs?
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05.07.2024