It was a political butt-kicking that was epic in every way. Pundits are crowing that it’s the end of woke, a massive turning point in the nation, and the beginning of the Trump -Vance era in American politics.
But not so fast. Conservatives need to temper this with a massive reality check.
Donald Trump came within 240,000 votes of losing the White House to Kamala Harris.
Two things can be true at the same time: Trump's win was historic, but it also has an Achilles heel -- margins of victory that are so slim that they are tenuous at best.
The political butt-kicking America handed Harris was tighter than any conservative wants to admit. The Left was beaten, not defeated, and Trump's mandate will evaporate in a heartbeat if conservatives hand everything back to the Left by giving up on the grassroots effort that secured this exceptionally narrow victory.
It’s all here in the 2024 election stats if you want to look.
Trump won the popular vote, but his margin was 1.6% or 2.5 million votes, the smallest since Reagan, and popular vote margins can easily be overcome every four years, especially one this small. It’s a natural part of the election cycle as fickle American voters shift between parties. Bush the Elder won the popular vote by 7.8% in 1988, which evaporated in his loss to Clinton in 1992.
People overlook that 48.5% of Americans voted to keep Harris and her Marxist woke policies in place. Half of America didn’t seem to mind that the border was wide open, Venezuelan gangs controlled apartment buildings, food was unaffordable, and children were abused with puberty blockers and permanently scarred to advance the trans agenda as boys pummeled girls in women’s sports.
The majority of the country did not shift to the right; the Left still has a solid competitive base. If you disagree, ask the 48.5% of Americans who thought four more years of the Biden administration on steroids was good for the country.
Trump won all swing states, but the Democrats had a path to the White House.
Nearly every swing state’s margin of victory was within the margin of error, which means they were winnable if the Left hadn’t chosen a dumpster fire candidate who ran a dumpster fire campaign. Consider this. Trump won Pennsylvania by 1.7%, Michigan by 1.4%, and Wisconsin by 0.9%. Harris only needed these vote totals, 130,000 in PA, 80,000 in MI, and 30,000 in WI, to win. Choosing Josh Shapiro as V.P. closes the gap in PA and helps her find an additional 110,000 voters in Michigan and Wisconsin to secure 44 more Electoral College votes.
Then it’s Harris 270 – Trump 268.
Imagine an America where Donald Trump wins the popular vote, the House, and the Senate but loses the White House by 220,000 votes in three battleground states.
Welcome to America’s Second Civil War.
I get it. She didn’t win; the pundits will tell you it was a spectacular butt-kicking. And it was. But this race was far more vulnerable than the punditry would let you believe. They’ll never tell you that the Left had an easy path to secure the White House if they chose a competent candidate.
The House of Representatives tells a similar story.
It took more than ten days after the election to declare that Republicans would secure a single-digit majority in the House, and many races still haven’t been called. Don’t blame the delay on mail-in balloting slowing the process (though it does). The races are too close to call because they are that tight. Margins that narrow can be easily flipped during the midterms, which are notorious for giving the House majority to the party outside the Oval Office.
Pundits paint 2024 as a historic win that saved America, and in many ways, it has. But they ignore how close this election was, and that’s where the problem lies. This historic win has an Achilles heel no one talks about.
But guess who is talking? The Left. They know the stats, and they have no intention of backing down.
They lost a significant battle, but they didn’t surrender their ideological arms in America’s culture war. I didn’t see any flags of surrender or come to Jesus moments where leftists donned sackcloth and ashes, begging forgiveness, repenting for the generations of cultural rot they poured out on America, and neither did you.
That’s because they have no intention of giving up the fight.
They’re going to do exactly what Republicans did after 2020. They’ll take the loss, reevaluate, rebrand, remessage, and create a strategy to reclaim the Latinos, black men, women, and working-class Americans who voted for Trump and secured his victory. The Left will work hard to keep the 48.5% who voted for Harris intact, keeping it competitive. They’ll work harder to overcome the slim margins in the swing states and House races, just as Republicans did in 2024.
This is the Achilles Heel of Trump’s historic win; the margins are too close to take for granted.
Conservatives will hand it back to the Democrats in 2026 and 2028 if they abandon the grassroots movement that secured this election.
Trump’s effort was heroic, but he couldn’t have won without a grassroots movement that exploded new Republican registrations, brought the Amish out in force, won the mail-in voting game, motivated the low-propensity crowd, told the Church to get into the game, and appealed to their friends and family that America’s future was on the line.
Are conservatives willing to make this fight a part of their DNA moving forward? This remains to be seen.
They haven’t had the heart for it in the past, which means the resurgence of America under Trump's leadership will be for naught if conservatives ignore the election’s Achilles Heel and abandon the grassroots movement that secured the victory that delivered us from evil.
Source: American Thinker.
