David Frum

that in 1932, maybe the worst year in recent American history since the Civil War, depths of the Depression, Americans literally going hungry, people losing their homes, people losing their farms.

Incumbent President Herbert Hoover still got 38% of the vote.

The base is called your base for a reason.

They stick with you through thick and thin.

I think there are a lot of Americans in 1932 who said, you know, don't love going hungry, don't love losing my home and farm, but at least Hoover is holding the line on prohibition.

And that's the thing I really care about.

Or my grandfather fought at Antietam, and by God, on his deathbed, he made me swear, never vote for a Democrat, and I never will, even though I've lost my farm.

And so he got 38% of the vote in 1932.

There are floors in a two-party system.

On the other hand, the Republicans still lost the election of 1932.

Trump's big plan for 2026 was to use executive power to control the elections.

Stop either presidentialize the elections in some way or use ICE to keep people away from the polls.

But there are 9,000 polling voting jurisdictions in the United States, I'm told by Stephen Richer, the heroic recorder of deed in Maricopa County, Arizona.

The states control the elections and they're just as big as ICE has become.

You can't actually federally occupy an American election, which is a creature of state law.

So all of Trump's schemes, many of which have been struck down by the courts already, but even those that have not yet been, are only workable, only imaginable in a world in which the Republicans are two or three points down, four or five points down.

If they're really down, there's just nothing that can save you.

His other problem is he had this idea, I think, I'm guessing,

that if he had a cheap and easy success, he remembered the 90-point approval ratings that George H.W.

Bush and George W. Bush had in the first shock of foreign policy crisis.