Lindsey Graham is dancing on the head of a pin trying to save Donald Trump and he’s not doing a very graceful job of it:
Sure, right. Trump is listening to that.
He has staked EVERYTHING on the lie that he’s won the election in a landslide. He’s going to want his lawyers to make that case when he sees how the Democrats lay out the case that the Big Lie incited the crowd on January 6th.
In fact, they have already put that out there:
To the extent Averment 5 alleges his opinion is factually in error, the 45th President denies this allegation.
It is not factually in error. And, by the way, Trump and his people knew it was a lie.
Former president Donald Trump lost the 2020 election largely due to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a post-election autopsy completed by Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio.
The 27-page document shows that voters in 10 key states rated the pandemic as their top voting issue, and President Biden won higher marks on the topic. The report also indicates that Trump lost ground among key demographic groups he needed.
The internal report cuts against Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him and that Biden could not have fairly beaten him — and mirrors what many Trump campaign officials said privately for months.
The analysis by Fabrizio, a Florida pollster who has worked for Trump for years, was shared among campaign advisers late last year and was provided to The Washington Post on Monday night. Politico first reported on the existence of the document.
He lost a whole lot of people he needed for entirely legitimate reasons:
The report, which groups states into ones Trump held versus ones that were flipped, says that voters found Biden more competent to deal with the coronavirus crisis and in both groups gave him higher marks on being honest.
Although Trump “dominated” among voters focused on the economy, according to the analysis, “Biden won Coronavirus voters, which was a bigger share.”
It outlines in specific detail how Trump lost key demographic groups that he needed to win, while lauding some of his gains among minority groups.
“POTUS suffered his greatest erosion with White voters, particularly White Men in both state groups. However, he made double digit gains with Hispanics in both groups, while his performance among Blacks was virtually the same as 2016. POTUS lost ground with almost every age group in both state groupings,” the autopsy reads, adding that the worst loss was among White college-educated voters.
“In 2016, Trump won Independents by double digits in both the Flipped and Held groupings. They shifted against him significantly in 2020,” the analysis reads.
Voters over 65 also shifted away from Trump, the report says.
There were several other findings that hurt him, too. Voters who made up their minds in the final month of the campaign narrowly went for Biden over Trump, the report says, even though Trump hoped to gain steam after his final debate performance.
And while Trump spent much of the final days pushing through Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination, it may have backfired politically, Fabrizio writes.
“9-in-10 voters in both groups said that SCOTUS was a factor in deciding their vote. Ironically, those who said it was a factor voted for Biden in both state groups while those who said it wasn’t a factor voted for POTUS by large margins.”
He knew. He did it anyway. And there’s no way in hell he will ever concede. In fact, I think he wants his team to say the election was stolen, implicitly defending the insurrection.