Thus far, Donald Trump is essentially re-running his 2016 campaign in his bid to win the presidency in 2024.  He has chosen to emulate his 2016 scorched earth primary campaign and hope for the same outcome despite a far different America and a far different Donald Trump. 

The electoral landscape is not the same as 2016 and Trump is no longer the brash no-holds-barred insurgent candidate with whom the corporate media was infatuated as they gave him nearly $5 Billion in free coverage, which was mostly favorable, during his primary campaign. 

There are four factors that were not in play in Trump’s successful run in 2016 and that cannot be ignored in 2024.  They are Trump’s highly successful but tumultuous presidency, the absolute necessity of overcoming massive voter fraud and manipulation, shifting demographic voting patterns, and as the 2022 mid-terms revealed, reliance on pocketbook and governing competency issues alone no longer win elections. 

Trump addresses his first campiagn rally in Waco, Texas (YouTube screengrab)

Recently, Trump featured on his Truth Social account a December 2021 article I wrote highlighting the overwhelming success of his presidency.  Despite facing gratuitous criticism from the usual quarters accusing me of being obsequious and hyperbolic; I stand by my assertion that he was the right president at the right time and thus among the pantheon of indispensable presidents. 

Trump’s near unprecedented success in office came with extraordinary financial and personal cost as well as malicious media and Democrat-induced animosity from a substantial portion of the electorate.  Twenty-six months after leaving office only 39% of Americans have a favorable opinion of him and 61% (which includes 25% of Republicans) do not want him to be president again.  The replaying of his no-holds-barred 2016 tactics in 2024 will only feed into the grossly unfair portrait embedded in far too many peoples minds.

The 2020 election was littered with brazen and unfettered ballot harvesting, mail-in voting, ballot manipulation by lawfare, unconstitutional election law changes by courts, and outright voter fraud by the Democrats in every battleground state.  Unless addressed forcefully in 2024, Trump’s prospect of winning enough electoral votes is problematic.  It cannot be done without an all-out concerted effort to monitor the vote, to ballot harvest and to aggressively promote mail-in and early voting among Republican and Independent voters. 

But this requires a massive army of volunteers and activists which Trump’s staunchly loyal base (perhaps 33% of Republican voters)  cannot provide.  Instead, he will need to recruit from the entire universe of those that identify as conservative, independent or Republican in order to offset Democrat voting machinations.

If Trump continues with the same blitzkrieg campaign style of bludgeoning his opponents as unmercifully as he did in 2016, he will be unable to marshal an enthusiastic and determined army of volunteers and activists so vital to combating voter fraud and manipulation.

These same campaign tactics will also further alienate the younger voters (Millennials and Gen Z) Trump will need to vote for him in the 2024 general election as this massive segment of the citizenry is growing in influence with each passing election.

In 2016 this group accounted for 36% of all registered voters and represented less than 32% of the overall vote and voted 55-38% for Hillary Clinton.  In 2020 they accounted for 44% of all registered voters, represented 43% of the overall vote and voted 54-43% for an addled Joe Biden.  In 2024 it is estimated that they will total nearly 53% of all registered voters.  The Democrats plan in 2024 is to focus on turnout in order to achieve a goal of at least 50% of the overall vote.

Despite rampant inflation, impending recession, massive disapproval of Biden’s job performance, and 75% of the country agreeing with the statement that the nation is on the wrong track, in the 2022 mid-terms these two generations voted 57-40% for Democrat House candidates. That lopsided vote tally is among the primary reasons the expected red wave did not materialize.

Over the past four election cycles (two presidential and two midterms) the Republican deficit has averaged 16 percentage points.  It will be nearly impossible for Trump to win the presidency without reducing the deficit with this voting bloc to at least 5-6 percentage points.  Trump and his campaign have yet to acknowledge this reality or attempt to relate to younger voters or develop a strategy for capturing a significantly higher percentage of this vote as they are living and campaigning in 2016.

The 2022 mid-term election revealed that the traditional Republican reliance on pocketbook issues and governing competence to win elections is increasingly outdated.  Instead, a political party’s ability to “get out the vote,” the candidate’s personal traits and affiliations and, because of the impact of the younger generations, societal issues have become the keys to winning federal elections. 

If Trump continues in his quest to again occupy the Oval Office, his campaign needs to dramatically adjust to the above factors that did not exist in 2016 as the importance of the upcoming election cannot be overstated.

If the Democrats win the White House in 2024, the American Marxists will have controlled the presidency for sixteen out of twenty-years.  By 2028 radical leftwing presidents and the Democrat party will have transformed the Judiciary into a de facto quasi-Marxist legislature and whoever wins in 2024 will probably nominate at least one or two Supreme Court Justices.  Thus, there will be no check on the Democrats governing by executive order and the current emergence of a two-tier justice system will be irreversible regardless of the make-up of Congress. 

It is imperative that Trump, if he is the Republican nominee, wins in November of 2024.  If he does not, his hard-earned and extraordinary legacy will be essentially erased, and the country, in all likelihood, will accelerate past the point of no return.