Trump cannot win a general election against Biden.
Edited by Agatha:
Edited to remove reference to forum management issue
Anyway, 1 with at least the beginnings of a reason to actually believe it would be better... like this:
Republicans have won ONE popular vote for President in the last 35 years.
(I think you mean one who wasn't an incumbent, right?)
Unfortunately, that doesn't cut it.
For one thing, the rural party doesn't need the popular vote to win the Presidency over the urban party.
Second, 1 proves that it is possible, and the claim that started this was that it's impossible (and 1 out of the last 8 or 9 elections, or less than that if we're only counting non-incumbents, isn't even particularly tiny odds).
Third, a Biden popular-vote loss is what the surveys show us heading for, whether it would be the first time in whatever number of years or not. (They've wavered between a popular-vote loss and a toss-up, which averages out to a small loss... in an election where he needs to not just win but win by a certain minimum margin, not just any majority.)
And fourth, acting like it's already over and a Trump win is an absurd notion that could never really happen is an exact duplication of what many Democrats were doing when Trump actually won, except that the surveys now are slightly
better for Trump than they were back then.
Bonus problem: the "the surveys can be wrong; just look at how wrong they were when Trump won" response is multiple types of failure combined; the surveys got it
right that a Trump win was substantially likely, the pretense today that the surveys must be wrong in exactly the way we need is another exact duplication of the pretense back then that they were wrong in the exact way we need, to the small extent that any survey bias existed it was toward making things appear worse for Trump in the survey than they are in reality which is the
opposite kind of survey bias from the one the argument would need, and if you do acknowledge the reality of the situation but your response is just to whine & scold people for not already having fallen in line then that's just how to make things worse for your own side not better.
Bonus bonus problem: one might want to counter the Trump/Biden surveys with the election results in recent special elections, which have swung in Democrats' favor by an average of 11 points compared to historical trends, but those are other Democrats versus other Republicans, not Biden versus Trump. So that comparison only means Biden should be up over Trump by about that much, which he isn't, so it only emphasizes that the Democrats are once again putting their weakest candidate up for the biggest position.
