When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, he put a severe dent in states that were considered, at the very least, light red, turning them into battleground states.
Joe Biden has largely destroyed that progress, and we need only look at the former swing state of Iowa as proof.
Talking Points…
- Barack Obama inroads
- Trump turns the tide
- Analysis
During the 2008 election, Barack Obama severely damaged the electoral map, obliterating the late Senator John McCain (R-AZ). Obama won the election in a massive landslide, 365-173. Obama took battleground states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin but also won Virginia and North Carolina. The two biggest blows to the GOP were Obama's wins in Florida and Iowa, the latter by almost 10 points.
In 2012, it was a different candidate but the same result. Obama crushed Romney in the electoral vote, winning 332-206. Romney managed to win North Carolina, but that was the only real movement in the race. He also lost Iowa to Barack Obama, but the margin was tighter, with Obama "only" winning the state by about six points.
While Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, the electoral map was a landslide in his favor, winning 304-227. Trump retook all the states, or at least most of them, that Obama had stolen from the GOP in the previous two elections while also throwing a few blue wall states in there just for fun. He turned Iowa red again, destroying Hillary by nearly 10 points.
The 2020 election was almost a complete reversal of the 2016, with Biden winning 306-232. However, Trump managed to hold Iowa, beating Biden by about eight points, which surprised many due to how strongly Obama had performed with Biden as his VP in the 2008 and 2012 elections.
In polls this year, Iowa is dominated by Donald Trump. The most recent polling shows that Trump had an 18-point lead over Biden, with less than five months to go before the election. The Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll has Trump up 50-32, showing a massive swing to the right that does not bode well for Biden in other battleground states.
The truly bad news for Biden is that Trump's lead continues to grow, picking up three full points from the previous polling that was taken before Trump was found guilty in the 34-count indictment in New York. It would appear that the Democrat strategy of touting Trump as a "convicted felon" is falling on deaf ears.
The Democrat Party is panicking right now, calling in all the big dogs to try to slow the momentum of the Trump campaign. Joe Biden continues to rake in big bucks, but the money is coming from all the same people, just as it did this weekend.
Biden held a massive Hollywood fundraiser that reportedly took in close to $30 million, a record haul for Joe Biden, but Hollywood's elite were opening up their pocketbooks. Obama touted Biden and his administration, telling the crowd "… that we don't have to just vote against something in this election," which is how they had framed the 2016 and 2020 elections. The fundraiser backfired, however, as Gen Z was livid that people like George Clooney and Jimmy Kimmel were telling younger voters to "reengage" and vote for Biden. One Gen Z voter summed it up best, stating:
"They're only arms of the propaganda machine just telling us to vote for an old senile man, because that's what they've been told to say. So I think, at best, they [the Biden administration] have no opportunity to win Gen Z.
"My generation doesn't watch any of these actors. The best they have is probably Jack Black, but I had to Google what movies he was in, and the best he has is probably the latest Mario movie. But then again, I don't think my generation even knows his face because, well, he was just a voice actor in that movie."
Biden is bleeding minority and young voters, both of which played a crucial role in winning in 2020. Without those two voting blocs, Biden's chances of winning this election slowly but surely keep slipping further and further away. Please make no mistake about it: As we sit today, this election is Trump's to lose.
