After the midterm election, Joe conducted an informal poll to see which presidential candidates his subscribers would support in the upcoming 2024 election. The informal poll ran for seven days. The candidates and results are posted below:
Several things stood out to Joe From Texas as he reviewed these results, the most obvious one being that 80% of respondents would like to see Donald Trump return as president. He also found it interesting that the current occupant of the White House, Joe Biden, tied for last in the poll with an unnamed independent.
Joe from Texas also found the result interesting because many Democrats and people in the mainstream media have tried to paint the recent midterm election as a loss for Republicans, especially Trump. Their story line is that, since many Trump endorsed candidates did not win when most pundits were expecting a Republican landslide election, that Trump and Republicans were the losers on election night. Those who follow this line of thinking believe that this demonstrates that Trump can’t win in 2024.
Whether he can win and or can’t win in 2024 is yet to be determined. However, there are some problems with the logic of those who buy into this line of thinking. The first problem in this thinking is that Republicans gained seats for the second straight election cycle and won control of the House. This is no small accomplishment. Although Republicans did not win control of the Senate, they did not fare poorly given the fact that, from an incumbent standpoint, the cycle favored Democrats, who were defending far fewer seats than were Republicans.
Dick Morris, who served as political advisor to President Bill Clinton, said the only defeat that Republicans suffered was at the hands of their own expectations. “The Republican candidates for the House got 52,690,787 votes while Democrats only got 48,096,016 votes — almost a 5 million-vote Republican majority. This margin of victory, against the backdrop of President Joe Biden’s 7.1 million-vote defeat of Trump in 2020, indicates a 12-million vote shift between 2020 and 2022, the largest gain by Republicans between the presidential and congressional elections going back to before 2000.” (source: https://www.dickmorris.com/dont-let-the-media-con-you-the-gop-did-not-lose-the-midterms/)
In short, Republicans made gains in 2022 and there is momentum that can carry into 2024. As Joe From Texas said in his recent reflection on the 2022 midterm: Game On!