I would put that under category A. Although with this electorate who knows the corpse of Trump could still win the primary.
Being a corpse is not necessarily an obstacle to winning a primary or an election.
I think there’s a fourth possibility.
The Republicans decide to run a relative moderate who’s willing to put some distance between himself and Trump. Not go on a full-on attack but just make it clear that he feels Trump made some mistakes and he’s not going to act like Trump did.
Will this outrage Trump and his supports? Hell yes. Trump will denounce this usurper and tell his followers not to support him. Which they will.
But where will they go? Are Trump loyalists going to vote for Biden (or Harris or whoever the Democratic nominee is)? No, they’ll just sit out the election and become a non-factor.
So the Republican can go back to running a traditional presidential race like they did before 2016. Make claims that Biden is too liberal and too old and will probably drop dead before 2028 and make Harris the President. Throw in some other scare issues. Present the Republican candidate as the “safe” choice; the guy who can be trusted to keep the country from going too far to the left or the right. Basically run a candidate who won’t upset people.
And the Republicans know that those people will sit out the election, which is exactly why they don’t want to go that route.
If the Trump loyalists sit out the 2024 election, then the Republicans lose. You don’t think that they don’t know that too?
Run Trump, or run someone worse than Trump and supported by Trump is all the GOP has.
I know we shouldn’t tempt fate by saying “How much worse could it get…” but my god, does my mind boggle at trying to picture this person.
Greg Abbott or Ron DeSantis. Just as bad, but can think.
Some probably do. But many probably expect a quick victory, being convinced that a majority of the opposition are weak pussies who’ll cry and piss themselves just from being threatened – and that they can count on the aquiescence of Mr. and Mrs. Homeowner Concernedparent who’ll just want to minimize disruption to their personal safety while the few opponents who do resist are mopped up.
So, basically, run the Biden campaign all over?
Again, you’re treating “Republicans” as a rational unitary actor, and you’re differentiating between “Republicans” and “Trump and his supporters.” How are “Republicans” going to make this decision to spurn Trump and run a moderate? They’ll decide who they’re going to run for President via the primary process, and that’s a process in which Trump will have enormous strengths.
They’ll call it the George W. Bush campaign.
People keep saying this like it’s a fact. It’s not. The fact is the Trump loyalists showed up in 2020 - and Trump lost the election. Donald Trump is the one candidate the Republicans know Joe Biden can beat. So why would they go back for a second try?
I can think of 74 million reasons to pair with a shaky Democratic coalition.
So what? Biden got eighty-one million and the Republican base is a lot shakier than the Democratic one. There is no rational reason to think Trump would do better in 2024 than he did in 2020.
Yes, the nightmare scenario has been sitting there all this time. The US electoral process is a Rube Goldberg contraption that has only worked because until now, nobody really had the power and desire to subvert it.
If you really want to understand who’s responsible for blowing up the norms, watch what happens the first time someone tries to make the electoral college harder to subvert. (And I’m talking here about bringing a vote in Congress, not just grousing on cable about how the last election went unfairly).
It will be the Democrats who want to reform it, and it will be Republicans who vote it down. Republicans will rationalize it by saying crap like “states rights, intent of the founders”. But it’s really because this ramshackle process is very vulnerable to attack and subversion, and Republicans see it as one of their best hopes to preserve permanent minority rule.
Not by nearly as comfortable a margin as I would like.
No they don’t. For one, most of them don’t believe that Biden actually won, they think that he was fraudulently elected. Also, have you seen how much Biden’s approval has gone down since the election?
If another election had been held in March of 2020, Biden would have won. If an election were held today, I wouldn’t count on it. We’ve got another long 2 and a half years till the next one, why are you so confident that Biden will improve his chances over that time?
For one, as I said, I don’t think that Biden would win today if the vote were held now. Also, once they put into place voting restrictions that are justified in the name of election security, and that have the effect of disenfranchising millions of Democratic votes, he’ll have little chance.
I don’t see how that follows. The shakiness of the Republican party is entirely in the Trump/Anti-Trump split. The anti-Trumpers are not the ones in control of the party, and they will fall in line come general election time, rather than allow a Democrat to stay in office. The shakiness of the Democratic party is based on the fact that they have vastly differing goals, and are only combined for the sake of forming an opposition party to the Republicans. Lotta people who claimed to be left leaning in 2020 that didn’t vote for Biden because he wasn’t left enough, or his name wasn’t Sanders. The Trumpfire motivated some of them to vote for country over fantasy, but memories are short, and the same ones that couldn’t vote for Hillary over Trump in 2016 will make the same choice they made then.
There have been plenty of reasons given that Trump would do better, and that a Democratic candidate would do worse, whether that be Biden or someone else. Just because you are dismissive of them does not make them irrational. People were pretty sure that Trump couldn’t win in 2016, and that was part of the reason that he did. Your complacency does democracy no favors.
What is your definition of “shakier”? “Listens to more Shakira”? 
The Republican base is so solid they all voted for Trump, twice.
When I read your posts about this topic I find myself baffled by the assumptions and paths you make.
The followers might believe that Trump won the election but the people who run the party know the reality. These people are professional politicians and they don’t believe the lies they tell the mob.
And it doesn’t really matter anyway. Regardless of whether they accept that Biden legitimately won the election of they believe that Biden successfully stole the election, the result is the same. Biden is President and Trump is not. There’s no reason why the Republican leaders will want to replay that match-up.
And it would happen again if Trump runs. If Trump is the Republican nominee, that will remind everyone of why they voted for Biden in 2020. Trump’s name on the ballot will give Biden twenty million votes he won’t get if anyone else is his opponent.
And I’m reading so many other posts in this thread and wondering why people believe Trump is unbeatable after he’s already been beaten.
I feel like I’m in a thread about last year’s Superbowl and you guys are explaining why you’re still betting on Kansas City.
Who has said this?
I agree with @Snowboarder_Bo. I don’t mean this in a snarky way at all, but I think you need to educate yourself further about the structural and very significant changes the GOP and their financial backers are trying to impose ahead of the elections in 2022 and 2024. They are very damaging – and so far, these efforts are comparatively unchallenged. They are really dangerous, and they do rig future elections very much in favor of Republicans.
I don’t think you read the link to the AP News piece I posted in my post earlier in this thread:
The piece summarizes very clearly what we are facing that we have not faced before.
The AP is not given to histrionic or partisan writings. They are a news clearinghouse, one that has been in the news business since 1846. This is not an opinion piece.
One last point, and again, no snark intended. Somewhere in this thread I believe you said you view Kevin McCarthy as a “leader.” I hope you revisit this opinion. Kevin McCarthy is a leader in the way a tissue paper is a wall. He has no ambitions beyond becoming Speaker of the House. He doesn’t give two shits about preserving democracy. You’re counting on guardrails that don’t exist.