ELDER PATRIOT - Ted Cruz and his establishment allies keep telling us that Trump cannot win the general election. They point to polls that show Hillary Clinton beating Trump by approximately nine points. They conveniently ignore the lessons of the last populist candidate to run for president, Ronald Reagan.
In early April of 1980 Reagan trailed incumbent Jimmy Carter by seven points and wound up winning the general election by ten points. That year, third party candidate John Anderson attracted seven percent of the anti-incumbent vote keeping Reagan from an even larger margin of victory. Significantly, Carter got 41% of the votes in the November election, the exact percentage he polled in April.
Hillary is promoting herself as running for Obama’s third term making her as much an incumbent as possible. Mrs. Clinton will be lucky to even maintain her April poll numbers because of the FBI probe into influence peddling that she allegedly orchestrated while Secretary of State. In the year of the outsider Hillary is the ultimate insider.
Additionally, the pundits who use these recent polls to bolster their argument are the same ones who have spent the last ten electoral cycles telling us no Republican candidate can win the presidency if they can’t win Texas, Florida and Ohio.
Texas is a slam-dunk for any Republican, especially since they’ll be running against Clinton who is widely detested throughout the state. For his part, Trump ran second in the primary to Ted Cruz in Texas proving that voters in Texas didn’t reject him, only that they preferred their homeboy.
It’s the other two states that suggest that between Trump and Cruz Trump has the better chance of beating Hillary in a head-to-head matchup.
In Ohio, Cruz garnered only 13.1% of the vote among Republicans who voted in their primary. Trump almost tripled Cruz’s vote total and finished second to Ohio Governor John Kasich.
Despite his second place finish, Trump still garnered more votes from Ohioans than Clinton did in winning the Democratic primary. Clinton got more than 2.5 times than Cruz did.
All of this suggests that the voters of Ohio are jazzed to vote for a Republican, just not Ted Cruz.
This brings us to Florida where Cruz again finished third. Trump’s vote total was more than 2.5 times that of Cruz’s. Looking back to 2012, Mitt Romney wound up getting over 300,000 less votes in that year’s primary than Trump did this year. This year Cruz finished almost 400,000 votes behind Romney’s total from 2012.
Even Bernie Sanders, as 74 year old socialist got 40% more votes in Florida than Ted Cruz id.
President Obama won Florida twice running against unpopular establishment Republicans like Ted Cruz.
If Ted Cruz can’t win the popular vote against Republicans how in the world can he win the popular vote in an open election?