If you read nothing but posts from conservative influencers on X, you’d be convinced that Donald Trump has already won the 2024 election.
The source of this sensationalized optimism comes from public polling data, which shows the former president with leads in key battleground states he needs to win this November. Some surveys also seemingly indicate that traditionally “blue states” like Virginia and Minnesota are in play.
With numbers like these and Biden’s approval rating sinking faster than Rachel Levine in a swimming pool, there’s no way Trump can lose, or so the conventional thinking goes.
While it’s certainly possible the polls are accurate, the outcome of recent elections should give conservatives reason to pump the brakes on celebrating before any ballots have been cast. Case in point: A special election held in Ohio’s 6th Congressional District on Tuesday.
The matchup between Democrat Michael Kripchak and Republican Michael Rulli wasn’t expected to be a close race. According to the Associated Press, former GOP Rep. Bill Johnson — who represented the district until his resignation earlier this year — “won his last four elections by more than 30 percentage points.” Trump similarly won the district by roughly 30 points during the 2020 contest.
While Rulli defeated Kripchak in Tuesday’s matchup and expanded Republicans’ thin House majority, the election was much closer than originally predicted. Preliminary results indicate Rulli won the race by 9.4 points — a more than 20-point shift in Democrats favor.
A Consistent Trend
But maybe last night’s election was a fluke. After all, voter turnout was seemingly low and will likely be higher during this fall’s presidential contest.
While such reasoning is certainly viable, it doesn’t take into account the growing list of recent elections in which Democrats have widely outperformed expectations at the ballot box.
Take the 2022 midterms, for example. As The Blaze’s Daniel Horowitz observed in November, the majority of polls predicting the outcome of the country’s biggest gubernatorial and Senate races overestimated Republicans’ chances of victory.
In Nevada’s Senate race, for instance, the RealClearPolitics polling average showed Republican Adam Laxalt beating Democrat Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto by 3.4 points. Cortez Masto ended up winning the election by 0.9 points. Similar trends were also seen in Michigan’s gubernatorial race, in which Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer defeated Republican Tudor Dixon by 10.6 points despite the RCP average projecting the former to win by only 1 point.
These alarming trends continued into 2023. A FiveThirtyEight analysis published in September found that Democrats not only won the majority of special elections between January and September 2023, but that they over-performed their projected margins. Even in the smattering of races Republicans won, Democrats managed to surpass expectations.
Democrats’ electoral hot streak was also apparent in off-year elections in November, in which their party won Kentucky’s gubernatorial race, a Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat, passed a ballot amendment that enshrined baby-killing into the Ohio Constitution, and took unified control of Virginia’s General Assembly. Republicans performed so poorly that they were left to brag about GOP Gov. Tate Reeves winning reelection in dark-red Mississippi by just 3.2 points. (Trump won the state by 16.5 points in the 2020 election.)
Democrats more recently won a February special election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District to fill former GOP Rep. George Santos’ seat. Democrat Tom Suozzi defeated Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip by 7.8 points — more than double the 3.7-point lead Suozzi was projected to win by, according to the RCP polling average.
Ballots Matter More Than Votes
While a long-used tool to predict election outcomes and margins, electoral polling has largely become obsolete because it can’t account for the highly-sophisticated election machine Democrats have spent years building.
On the nongovernmental side, left-wing nonprofits funded by leftist billionaires evade federal law by targeting and registering Democrat-friendly demographics, such as racial minorities, college-educated women, and young people. After these likely-Democrat voters are on the voter rolls, left-wing activists and groups chase and harvest these low-effort votes in the weeks leading up to Election Day.
Organizations such as the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence — the newest iteration of the “Zuckbucks” scheme used to boost Biden and Democrats in the 2020 election — are also attempting to influence election operations in various localities throughout the country. According to its website, election offices in key battleground states are active members of the Alliance, including Nevada’s Clark County and Georgia’s DeKalb County.
[READ: Republicans Need To Chase Ballots From Every Low-Turnout Voter Who Polls For Trump]
At the same time, Biden is actively weaponizing the federal government’s taxpayer-funded resources to conduct voter registration drives benefiting Democrats. More commonly known as “Bidenbucks,” the executive order signed by Biden in March 2021 instructed hundreds of federal agencies to increase their voter registration and GOTV activities — which Congress never authorized.
In fulfilling this mandate, agencies are tasked with coordinating with so-called “nonpartisan third-party organizations” approved by the White House to supply “voter registration services on agency premises.” Conservative media and good government groups have since discovered these organizations are extremely left-wing, such as the ACLU and Demos.
(A lawsuit challenging the legality of this order is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.)
Despite conservatives’ hype, election polls are meaningless. The only thing that matters in modern U.S. elections is getting ballots into boxes. Until Republicans learn to chase ballots and compete with the Democrats’ election machine, they can continue to expect to lose every significant election under the sun.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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