Only Trump Can Bring GOP Victory in the Electoral College

The only question for Republicans is: Which candidate can win states that Mitt Romney lost?

Start with the fact that, before any vote is cast on Election Day, the Democrats have already won between 90 and 98 percent of the black vote and 60 to 75 percent of the Hispanic and Asian vote. Unless Republicans run the table on the white vote, they lose.

If there’s still hope, it lies with Trump and only Trump. Donald Trump will do better with black and Hispanic voters than any other Republican. But it’s with white voters that he really opens up the electoral map.

{snip}

{snip} The national white vote is irrelevant. Presidential elections are won by winning states. {snip}

{snip}

Romney lost the white vote to Obama in five crucial swing states: Maine (42 percent of the white vote), Minnesota (47 percent), New Hampshire (48 percent), Iowa (48 percent) and Wisconsin (49 percent). He only narrowly beat Obama’s white vote in other important swing states–Illinois (51 percent), Colorado (52 percent), Michigan (53 percent), Ohio (54 percent) and Pennsylvania (54 percent).

Increasing the white vote in these states gives Trump any number of paths to victory.

If Trump wins only the same states as Romney, but adds Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois–where Romney’s white vote was below his national average–Trump wins with 280 electoral votes. (Romney wasn’t an ideal candidate in the industrial Midwest.)

Trump could lose any one of those states and make up for it by winning Minnesota and Wisconsin–where Romney actually lost the white vote. Or he could lose two of those states but add victories in places outside the Rust Belt, where Romney’s white vote was also below average, such as Colorado, Iowa, Maine and New Hampshire. (In 1992, Ross Perot came in second in Maine, beating George Bush.)

I haven’t even mentioned Florida, where Trump recently trounced Stuart Stevens’ dream candidate, Marco Rubio, a sitting senator–and a Cuban!–in a 20-point rout. Republican primary voters outnumbered Democratic primary voters in that election by more than half a million votes.

If Trump wins Florida, he needs to win only two or three of the 10 states where Romney either lost the white vote outright or won a smaller percentage of it than he did nationally.

{snip}

Trump is saying he’ll bring in lots of new people, as he has throughout the primaries. In the Florida GOP primary, for example, Trump got nearly half a million more votes than Romney did in 2012–and about half a million new people voted. Trump may be wrong, but it’s insane to say that it’s impossible for him to bring out new voters.

{snip}

Maybe 50 years of Third World immigration means it’s too late, and even Trump can’t win. But it’s an absolute certainty that any other Republican will lose.