Regarding the thread title, the indictment seems to have given Trump a boost in primary polling against DeSantis:
If Trump gets indicted again, could that be a knock-out blow for DeSantis?
I find no post-indictment reading yet on DeSantis’s November 2024 chances, but I think they will remain good in the somewhat unlikely event of his getting the nomination.
I don’t know how old you are either. I’m old enough to want discussion instead of status quo.
If Biden beats Trump next year, chances of a Democratic three-peat are low for both a normal and special reason.
The normal reason is the after eight years of the White House in one party’s hands, some voters will think it is time for a change.
The special reason is that after Trump, any other Republican will seem like a moderate to low-information voters.
If the media keeps insisting on treating the Republican party like a normal political party, you may be right.
And that depends on whether the craziness-based implosion of the GOP continues or not. I really don’t think that the party is capable of becoming semi-sane in the next four years. So instead of changing course, I think they are going to move in the direction of finding their new Trump.
I’m 64. One thing I’ve learned is that sometimes people have a very hard time distinguishing between what they want to happen and what they predict will happen.
Sometimes it’s obvious. I want Biden to beat the R candidate in 2024, and I want that R candidate to not be Trump. Conversely I predict Trump will be elected President in 2024 regardless of who the D candidate is. I further predict that will be the end of the republic as we know it.
I might want Newsom to try for the 2024 D nomination. I don’t predict that he will do so. And I predict not for the reasons I stated in my earlier post.
You?
Wait, do you really think that this is going to happen? I don’t think he will even get the nomination, owing to his legal troubles.
None of his legal troubles will result in a conviction before the convention starts in 15 months or the national vote is taken in 19 months. AUIU the first primary elections will be held in Feb 2024, 10 months from now. And compared to prior years, there’s a strong effort by both parties to front-load the primaries within the calendar and to have some of the big swing states go early. All of which means the R for sure, and maybe even the D, nomination will be all-but sewn up by Apr 2024, 12 months from now.
Hell, the very first hearing for the Stormy Daniels case is already set for 8 months from now in Dec. And will doubtless get a delay from there. We can have no expectation that even if another indictment in another unrelated case was unsealed tomorrow that the first hearing would be any sooner. Much less any convictions.
None of his legal troubles matter in the slightest to the people willing to vote for him. Who represent what, 80 million people? There is nothing about the legal cases which represent new revelations of new misdeeds. They were shrugged off by those voters when they first happened or were first reported, and they’ll continue to be shrugged off. They simply don’t matter to those people; they are fake news describing false accusations. If anything, further legal challenges just inflame their passion that their cult champion, like they themselves, is the victim of an elite plot.
Note I’m not saying we as a society should give Trump a pass to avoid energizing his base. I’m saying that by not having him convicted and in prison for treason a year ago over Jan 6, we’ve missed the opportunity to prevent him from running in 2024 with an energized base. We (the USA) snoozed & losed.
Trump is near-guaranteed to win the nomination if it’s a large field. It’s just math. A substantial chunk of GOP voters will vote for no one else. LSL is right that his legal troubles are irrelevant, and I don’t understand why anyone would think they matter. Trump’s base will vote for him even if he is actually in prison.
What a poll says about DeSantis in April of 2023 versus what it said in February doesn’t matter. What does matter is that millions of people are OBSESSED with Trump. He is a figure of just-short-of-religious worship. Ron DeSantis is not and never will be. If it’s just DeSantis vs. Trump, DeSantis can win, but it’s it’s another massive field, Trump is sure to win.
IMO doesn’t even need to be “massive”. In a three-way Between Trump, Anybody #1, and Anybody #2, Trump wins 99 times out of a hundred. Due to math, not due to any inherent superiority.
This is bog standard how many authoritarians get in and stay in. The opposition, whether within the Leader’s party or within competing parties are numerous and fractious. There is always a hard core of will-always-vote-for-the-Leader people out there. Whether the opposition divides the anybody-but-Leader vote 2 ways or 12 ways, it’s enough to guarantee the Leader wins. The only thing that matters is that the hard-core is big enough to overwhelm the biggest of the diluted opposition votes. The bigger the hard core, the fewer opposition shills needed. The smaller the hard core, the more opposition shills the Leader needs to recruit.
Trump has a huge hard core. He’s got two opponents lined up, DeSantis and Haley. That’s probably enough. To be really really sure he should be encouraging more R candidates just as he has encouraged Haley. For exactly that reason. If we see that behavior, it’s a very big tell.
LOL, I actually forgot Haley was even running until I saw this post. And I follow the news every day.
Haley is not going to be a factor in anything.
Yes, but in the vast majority of US history, a first-term president is not an octogenarian who has exceeded the life expectancy of his age-and-sex cohort by rather a lot. Pretending that 2024 is business as usual is a fool’s game: we have (in my opinion) a competent octogenarian vs a traitorous narcissist and fool, or else vs. an authoritarian proto-fascist.
The Democrats ought to be having some serious talks with Biden about who would have the best chance of winning in 2024, gaming the scenarios in which there’s a contest, Biden runs barely contested (see: Kennedy), or where Biden withdraws and annoints a successor. That’s game theory 101. Maybe they have, and have decided Biden’s their best bet, but I rather suspect they’re just especially beholden to norms and conventions and perceived stability after the chaos of the Trump years.
Haley cannot win, you’re 100% right about that. But that does not mean she won’t be a “factor”, something whose presence influences the outcome.
All she has to do is siphon more votes away from e.g. DeSantis (or whoever the number 1 challenger is) than she siphons away from Trump. The greater her differential draw, the greater a factor she is.
A good plan. Were “the Democrats” a business with a stable leadership for whom candidates and officeholders are mere senior VPs within the corporation, beholden to the Board and able to be promoted, demoted, or lateralled at will.
Unfortunately, the party apparatus (of both parties) is a weird hermaphrodite, permanent but not, in charge but not. For good or ill, Biden is driving the D’s train. Could he be persuaded to annoint a successor? Is that already his idea but he’s got a good poker face and better OpSec? Hell if I know. I honestly doubt that’s the direction its going. But I do know it’s wholly in his gift to do that or not do that. The organizational arrangements are not optimal, not by a long shot.
True.
Also true. His base is going to vote for him. But that didn’t give him the win in 2020, and the legal woes will hurt him among those who are not in his base. I.e., the legal woes will cause him to do worse than he did in 2020, among other factors (such as having already lost once).
Now did I also understand correctly that you think Trump will beat Biden? I don’t see why he would do better in 2024 than in 2020.
The thing being missed here is that, if someone major among the Democrats were intending to run, there would at least have been rumors by now. It’s not going to happen.
Biden already beat Trump. There is only one reason why he wouldn’t win again: he’s dead. So there is no need for “serious talks.” Biden will be the nominee, and Biden will beat any Republican who says they are running now, including Trump.
After Biden wins, then the issue of successor can be dealt with.
I actually don’t think Trump will get the nomination because he is going to be in such trouble by then that he will be more or less incapacitated by it all, and somehow or another it’s not going to happen. This is more my gut than brain at work, so I will not try to defend this as forcefully as I will some other points.
Re: “only one reason”: or (gods forbid) Biden is dead. Or he’s not facing Trump because Trump is dead, in jail, too cognitively impaired to be out on the campaign trail, or simply replaced by a DeSantis or other.
In short, even if Biden v. Trump is guaranteed Biden, that specific contest is far from guaranteed.
Here’s my take. And like you, I’m knowingly on softer ground with what follows than some of my other prognostications / pontifications.
Speaking to the general election, assuming arguendo that Trump has secured the Reactionary party nomination. …
Trump doesn’t need more votes in 2024 than he got in 2020. He just needs more votes than Biden will get in 2024 and those votes must come in the correct states.
The first one of those two conditions is pretty straightforward to understand / explain IMO.
We may not see it, but the frothing hate-making RW propaganda machine has not slowed down iota one since Jan 5th 2022. Yes, the 5th. They’ve been ensuring all Rs who watch that stuff even a bit, which is most of them, are fully fired up about all the ways those Evil Ds and their completely masterful yet somehow utterly incompetent senile leader Commie Biden have been Utterly Destroying America for the last 4 years. However late in the day it was to stop the slide into pure Communism / Wokism back in 2020, here in 2024 is the absolute last chance; America will Die if the Ds remain in power.
Even the business elite & country club Rs who care not a fig for social / religious anything plus or minus but want only low taxes and light regulations are running scared of the consequences of the Inflation Reduction Act and what an IRA-v2 in a D term two might mean for their businesses and their portfolios. The WSJ et al has been mansplaining this patiently but forcefully every day for 2+ years now and won’t be slowing down any time soon. They have their “base” highly motivated too. And highly conditioned as to which narrative to believe instinctively and which to reject before thinking.
Meanwhile over in the D camp, the effort to produce an energized base that can sense either imminent victory with one more push over the wall is … mostly absent. Conversely to the victory-is-at-hand crowd, there are lots of D’s who feel the movement has been pushed back until their back’s to the wall. Some will come out fighting, donating, volunteering, and voting. Many more will tune out in despair / disgust. It’s in the nature of the personality that tends to vote D.
The R’s most rabid partisans are angry. The Ds most rabid partisans are scared. Angry beats scared every time.
Which turns to my second point. The science of winning elections is even better now than it was 4 years ago. There are just a relatively few counties across the country that will determine this election. The US has roughly 3100 county / equivalent jurisdictions. No more than 50 of them will determine this race. The rest are noise. The effort to suborn the electoral apparatus in those counties has been going on for 6+ years now. It did not stop when Biden was elected because by and large the Rs control most of the relevant states & many of the relevant local governments.
They don’t need to produce sham results a la East Slobova where Dear Leader received 99% of the vote on 98% turnout. Then just need to shade things 5% their way. Intimidation, voter roll shenanigans, polling place quantity & operating hours, ease or not of mail-in voting, packing of courts to ensure shenanigan-stopping injunctions don’t happen, etc. Each plays a part and they’re all deployed in one and only one direction.
This election will turn, as they all do, on turnout in the swing states and especially the swing regions within those swing states.
If only.
The economy now, in actuality, is doing okay. Yet, recent polls show most Americans think it’s not doing okay.
Most economists agree the economy is about to enter a true downturn phase (probably mild, but some forecast a deeper decline).
What will most Americans think then? Not good news for Biden, whose approval ratings are already somewhat lower than they should be, even with the baked-in polarization.
I still think he can beat Trump (or DeSantis, or whomever), but death isn’t the only path to his failure to do so.
Yesterday my family and I ate lunch in Waukesha, Wisconsin (a suburb of Milwaukee), and I told them exactly this. “The purple around you in this room will decide the future of the United States of America.”
ETA: I meant “people,” but “purple” works perfectly! 