Donald Trump entered the Republican presidential primaries vowing that he would show the Republican party how to win again. It was a curious claim then, and it is a more curious claim now.
It is a curious claim now in that Trump, barring some black-swan-level event, is not going to win. If the election were held today, the most likely outcome would be that Hillary Rodham Clinton would finish with well over 300 electoral votes, easily besting Trump. Trump has even managed to put Texas and its 38 electoral votes into play. That’s a bit short of the “so much winning, you’ll get tired of it” that he boasted of; it isn’t even a little bit of winning, or even a decent showing.
It was a curious claim at the beginning of the primary season, too, in that Republicans had been doing a historically unprecedented amount of winning. They had a majority in the Senate, a substantial majority in the House, and a large majority of state governorships and state legislative houses. Even in Florida, a 50/50 Republican/Democratic state, Republicans could not do anything but win when it came to statewide offices and Senate elections. On top of all that, a generation-long project of judicial reform had borne fruit in the form of two very important Supreme Court victories, one for the First Amendment and one for the Second Amendment, which, the justices ruled, mean what they say, after all.
But nobody wins them all.
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