Democrats should brace for a shock four weeks from now – the possibility not just of a victory for former President Donald Trump but a win so big Trump even beats Vice President Kamala Harris in the popular vote.
Trump doesn’t need to do that, of course: He can return to the White House just by winning enough battleground states.
But if he does get more votes than Harris nationwide, it will prove he is more popular than ever and his message is even more powerful than it was when he overcame former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Trump’s path to this next upset runs through the House of Representatives.
His chances of success in the popular vote are intimately linked to the GOP’s prospects of extending its House majority.
Democrats only need a net gain of five seats to retake the House, yet there’s reason to think they won’t get that even if Harris wins the presidential race.
After all, when President Joe Biden received more than 81 million votes four years ago, Democrats still lost 13 seats in Congress.
Trump and the Republicans are almost two parties, allied but distinct, and not every Trump voter bothers to turn out for other Republicans when Trump isn’t on the ballot.
That hurt Republicans in the last midterm elections, just as Trump’s presence helped the party in 2020, when polls seriously underestimated GOP turnout.
But if congressional Republicans need Trump, now he knows he needs them too.
He learned the indelible lesson at the end of his last term that a Democratic House will impeach him, regardless of whether it can get the Senate to convict him.
This election is different from 2016, when Republicans felt safe in control of the House, or 2020, when they despaired of reclaiming it.
This time a GOP majority’s survival is in the balance, and Trump is motivated to save it.
That calls for measures that could win Trump the popular vote too.
What Trump’s team learned from the 2022 midterms is that blue-state Republicans matter.
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New York, New Jersey and California might be out of reach in the presidential struggle, but they have closely contested House races that Republicans must win to control Congress.
As of Oct. 4, the Cook Political Report listed six California congressional seats as competitive, five of them, all with Republican incumbents, as tossups.
New York has five competitive congressional seats, three of them tossups for currently Republican-held seats.
Painfully aware of the stakes, Trump aims to max out the blue-state GOP vote.
That includes repudiating one of his own signature achievements:
Trump now favors bringing back the federal deductions for state and local tax payments – the SALT deductions – he got rid of in his first term.
In high-tax states like New York and California, abolishing SALT was deeply unpopular.
Trump’s dash to the middle on abortion policy troubles social conservatives, but this evolution, too, may help him and other Republicans in more socially liberal blue states.
Meanwhile, immigration, a divisive topic when Trump began talking about it years ago, is now an issue on which a broad majority of Americans agree – and they agree with him.
A solid 59% of voters polled by Marist late last month expressed support for deporting all illegal immigrants.
Typically, immigration ranks second only to inflation among Americans’ top concerns – a powerful current for Trump to tap on Election Day.
He vastly increased his base of support from 2016 to 2020, winning more than 74 million votes in his contest with Biden.
And while Biden received more than that, in his second outing Trump not only improved on his previous total but blew past the nearly 66-million-vote mark Clinton set when she won the popular vote.
If Harris draws Biden-like numbers, she’ll almost certainly win the popular vote, though she could still lose the swing states – and with them, the White House.
But if Harris draws Clinton-like numbers, Trump has an excellent chance of winning not only the battleground states but the popular vote.
National polls heading into the final weeks are almost tied – and Harris is running behind where Biden and Clinton stood at this point in their races, both in national polling and most surveys of the battleground states.
Trump is still the underdog, but he’s doing better than in either of his previous races.
Democrats should prepare for heartbreak.
Republicans, for their part, should prepare to make this opportunity count.
