Even left-wing stalwart CNN can occasionally admit that Donald Trump is better at something than Joe Biden.
On Friday, CNN released its first electoral map, called the Road to 270, predicting which states seem likely to vote for Biden or Trump in November if Trump wins the Republican nomination.
According to CNN’s projected results, at this moment, it seems that Trump would win 272 electoral votes, two more than needed to secure the presidency. Two votes might seem like a slim lead, but the headwinds he’s been facing from legal prosecutions he’s facing in New York and Georgia and from the Department of Justice, combined with overwhelmingly hostile coverage from the establishment media, that kind of margin constitutes a major edge.
The map further suggests that Biden will struggle “to recreate his Electoral College majority from his successful 2020 run.”
Of course, CNN is at pains to point out that this map is not an absolute prediction.
As the article accompanying the map explains, “it is not a prediction of how things will turn out in November. It’s not even a prediction of what things may look like when the parties gather for their nominating conventions this summer.”
Rather, according to CNN, the map is more of an “exercise designed to capture where the race stands today.”
And of course, in characterizing Biden and Trump’s respective strengths and weaknesses, CNN makes its own biases abundantly clear.
Biden receives only one sentence describing his “stubbornly low approval ratings,” “concerns about his ability” to serve another term, and “diminished support from key coalitions.”
Will Trump win the Republican nomination?
Yes: 100% (1 Votes)
No: 0% (0 Votes)
Trump, on the other hand, receives an extensive paragraph that calls him a “seriously flawed candidate” who was “rejected by the American people” in 2020. (Does anyone want to remind CNN of Democrat Grover Cleveland, the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms?)
The rest of the paragraph, as is typical of CNN, is spent rehashing all the left-wing talking points and accusations, essentially treating all allegations against Trump, from supposedly mishandling classified documents to allegedly falsifying business records to pay hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, either as incontrovertible evidence of his poor character or his guilt.
Still, the fact that CNN is admitting that, even at this early date, Trump could have a very real chance of winning really says something about how most Americans, even those on the left, feel about Biden as a candidate.
Folks on the left may have been initially fooled by Biden’s former role as Obama’s VP, and implicit promise to revivify the Obama years, but Biden’s own demonstrable incompetence has torpedoed his chances and ruined the goodwill he had back in 2020.
Clearly, vast numbers of voters have serious misgivings about Biden serving a second term. The question that remains, however, is whom Americans want to replace him.
Despite the still-ongoing race for the Republican nomination, Trump is far ahead of his Republican rivals in the polls, and now has a projected lead on Biden, who faces some of the worst approval ratings of any recent president.
Biden has a much better chance of losing than he does of winning, but the Republican Party still needs to provide a strong candidate, one who will garner the support needed to beat Biden handily.
Trump remains the candidate to beat in the 2024 election. The main question plaguing the Republican Party right now is which candidate can best beat Biden — and right now, that candidate seems to be Donald Trump.
