Chris Crucial: Donald Trump's clear electoral college edge

PLUS: ANOTHER Trump trial delay!

Welcome to Chris Crucial. This is my nightly effort to summarize all the political news you need to know into a single newsletter. Two things to consider: 1) This is going to become a product for only PAID subscribers in the (very) near future and 2) The price for a subscription to this newsletter is going up on April 1. So, if you appreciate and value this content, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. Right now it’s just $5 a month or $50 a year!

1. The map: Now that we have officially have Donald Trump as the Republican presidential nominee and Joe Biden as the Democratic standard-bearer, it’s worth looking at where the general election — when it comes to the electoral college — starts.

This map, via CNN, seems basically right to me (although I am not sure about Nevada as lean Republican):

In case you don’t want to do the math yourself, the above map has 272 electoral votes for Trump and 225 for Biden. Which means that even if Trump lost the 40 electoral votes in the toss-up states of Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — he would still be elected president.

This is a function of two things — one short term and the other longer term.

The first is that, right now (and for the last few months), Trump has been steadily running narrowly ahead of Biden in swing states.

In just the last 24 hours, for example, three polls have been released in swing states. Fox conducted polls in Arizona (Trump +4) and Pennsylvania (Trump +2) and Quinnipiac University released a poll in Michigan on Thursday that had the former president at 48% to 45% for the current president.

The second reason is more structural: The electoral college currently favors a generic Republican candidate over a generic Democratic one.

The simple fact is that a Republican can win the White House while losing the popular vote. (George W. Bush did it in 2000; Donald Trump replicated it in 2016.) That could not happen for a Democrat. If a Democrat loses the popular vote, he (or she) would assuredly also lose the electoral college.

As the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, a nonpartisan handicapping service, noted in 2022:

In 1997, the median Electoral College vote (located in Iowa) had a PVI score of D+1; meaning that the median Electoral College vote was one point more Democratic than the nation as a whole. By 2005, the median Electoral College state (Florida) had a PVI of R+1. In 2021, Wisconsin, with a PVI score of R+2, is the median Electoral College vote. So, if, for example, a Republican presidential candidate were to get 49 percent of the national popular vote, we should expect that Republican to get 51 percent of the vote in Wisconsin. 

To ensure an electoral college victory, the Cook Report estimated that the Democratic nominee would need to win the popular vote by at least three points.

Which is a considerable problem for Biden (or ANY Democrat). How do they reverse the built-in Republican edge in the electoral college? Well, let’s look at how Biden won in 2020:

Biden won the Rust Belt (Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) swing states AND added Arizona and Georgia — two states that had been reliably Republican up until the last few elections. He did so while also keeping states like Virginia and Minnesota — where Republicans had suggested they could be competitive — in the Democratic camp.

The 2020 map gave Biden 306 electoral votes, which may be about the high water mark for a Democrat right now — given that Ohio and Florida (and, to a lesser extent, North Carolina), which were once swing states, are now more reliably Republican. (Biden won the popular vote by 4.4 points in 2020.)

The problem for Democrats is obvious. Biden has very little wiggle room; lose 37 electoral votes and he loses the presidency.

It’s critically important to understand that reality when we are talking about the 2024 election. Republicans start with a clear edge in the electoral college map — and it’s hard to see that changing between now and November.

2. Trump trial delay, redux: In a decidedly odd move, the Manhattan district attorney’s office proposed a 30-day delay in the scheduled trial over hush money payments allegedly made to two women by Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election.

The trial, led by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, was set to begin with jury selection on March 25. The delay was designed, according to the New York Times, “to give Mr. Trump’s lawyers time to review a new batch of records. The office only recently obtained the records from federal prosecutors, who years ago investigated the same hush-money payments at the center of the case.”

The hush money trial was expected to be the first of Trump’s four indictments to go to court. Several of the other cases — including special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s action in and around the 2020 election — are delayed until the Supreme Court rules on whether Trump is entitled, as president, to total immunity.

The Supreme Court is expected to hear oral arguments in that case — which Trump lost at a lower court — next month. A ruling from SCOTUS won’t come before the end of June.

All of these delays, obviously, work in Trump’s favor. He has long favored delay as his preferred legal strategy — and that is especially true as he seeks to keep any conviction (he is facing 91 criminal counts) until after the November 5 election.

3. What “The Simpsons” can teach us about Donald Trump: On my You Tube channel, I explained what the long-running animated cartoon — and this scene in particular — can tell us about the difficulties of covering the former president. Watch! And subscribe!

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“Scarlett Johansson is hot, and I am genuinely jealous … At least you were played by a woman … I’ve also been played by a woman. They cast Aidy Bryant as me … She looks pretty good in a beard, by the way.” — Texas Sen. Ted Cruz

ONE GOOD CHART

The Senate may well move in the next few days to ban TikTok (or, at a minimum, force a sale of the China-owned company). But, the public has grown less supportive of such a ban in the last year, according to this Pew chart.

SONG OF THE DAY

Vampire Weekend doesn’t make a TON of music but the music they make is always GREAT. “Classical” — their new song — is no exception. And the band’s new album will be out early next month!