Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 02:00 pm
An analysis of Republican primary data has revealed that Donald Trump’s claim that he is expanding the Republican Party is a total lie.
Here is what Politico found when they analyzed the data from the Florida and Ohio Republican primaries:
And in Florida, one of the nation’s most critical battleground states, Republican primary turnout jumped by 40 percent from 2012 to 2016. But only 6 percent of those who voted in the 2016 Republican primary did not vote in either of the 2012 or 2014 general elections and were registered to vote then. That amounts to a lot of people—about 142,000—but it’s a fractional share of a populous and fast-growing state that has added almost 1 million voters to the rolls since the beginning of 2012.
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There were roughly 60,000 new voters in the Ohio Republican primary, for instance. But there were also about 58,000 new voters in the Democratic primary, suggesting those additions amounted to a wash, according to Mike Dawson, an Ohio elections statistics expert.
In state after state, the data showed that Trump was not expanding the Republican Party with new voters. Trump has been making this dubious claim based on the increased turnout for Republican primaries, but it was only within the last month that Trump began to get a majority of the vote in these states. The increased vote could have just as easily been Republicans trying to stop Trump as it was enthusiastic supporters of the candidate.
Donald Trump has conned Republicans into believing that he increased the size of their party when he hasn’t. Trump isn’t Bernie Sanders. The presumptive Republican nominee isn’t leading a wave of new voters who will power his party to victory in November.
The big lie that Trump successfully sold Republicans is that he can grow the party and win the general election, but he hasn’t grown the Republican Party. There are not millions of new voters marching to the polls determined to elect a Republican to the White House.
It is all a myth.
In the coming months, Trump will repeat his big lie over and over again. Republicans have already convinced themselves that it is true, but the data suggests that the Republican Party is in the same position that it occupied in 2008 and 2012.
When Trump’s phantom millions of voters fail to materialize on Election Day, Republicans will likely blame the media and the polls. What they definitely won’t do is admit that they were conned by Donald Trump.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
