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You are here: Home / 2024 Campaign / It Will Come Down to About 400,000 Votes

It Will Come Down to About 400,000 Votes

December 30, 2023 at 9:55 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

John Ellis: “It’s important to remember which voters we’re talking about here. We are not talking about the 155 million or 165 million people who will vote in next year’s general election. Biden will win the popular vote handily, just as he did in 2020. What we’re talking about is maybe 400,000 voters, at the very most, in six or eight ‘battleground states,’ who will determine the outcome of the election in the Electoral College. Lest anyone forget, in 2020 ‘just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.’”

“And it’s here that we get to a much-overlooked fact of the 2020 election: Had the Trump campaign embraced early and mail-in voting, and made it a top priority of the then-president’s re-election campaign, Trump would have won the election in the Electoral College. In the event, the Democratic Party’s embrace of early and mail-in voting carried the day (barely).”

“Turning out the vote is something the Trump campaign did very well on Election Day, in 2020. Early voting is something it will do as well in 2024 and especially well in those ‘battleground states.’ Team Trump will not make the same mistake twice. Or as Trump himself put it back in March: ‘Republicans must compete using every lawful means to win. That means swamping the left with mail-in votes, early votes and election day votes.’”

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Filed Under: 2024 Campaign

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About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.

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