That’s the only question that’s meaningful, and it’s unanswerable. Forget about him being 86 when his term ends if he’s elected. Will he live until next year? He looks old. He looks bad. He walks like he’s trying to keep himself upright. The Presidency is a killing job, and it’s killing him.
If Biden dies or has to step down and Kamala Harris is President then all is chaos. (My spell check doesn’t recognize Kamala. Think about that.) Can DeSantis win against Harris? Very likely. Trump might be able to win against Harris. Or maybe not. Maybe the circumstances will make her as election-proof as Johnson was in 1964. The only way to bet about 2024 is to lay huge amounts of money down on “One Heartbeat” as the title of half the post-election book analyses of the election.
It seems problematic to talk about Trump being diminished in their eyes due to losing, term limits, legal problems, etc. because for many of them, these problems do not exist. In their delusional worldview, Trump didn’t actually lose, therefore he’s undefeated, therefore he can get some sort of do-over on term limits, and the legal problems are actually Trump secretly working with the DOJ to bring down pedophiles.
Any analysis is doomed if it involves Trumpers heeding any sort of wake-up call. The kind of person who voted Trump in both 2016 and 2020 is not the sort of person to let a little thing like reality get in their way.
And the addict metaphor? What do addicts do when their drug no longer gives them the same kick? Do they consume larger doses, or smaller doses?
I will say I see DeSantis as being not great, but stronger than you see him. I don’t believe Trump’s primary appeal is being a destructive chaos agent. What they love about him is how he trolls the libs and wrecks things they consider important. DeSantis certainly has a way of doing that, and in some ways he might do it better (the migrant trafficking stunt employed a degree of calculation that I don’t think Trump really uses).
I think DeSantis is praying for atherosclerosis or the Department of Justice to do a job on Trump. If he gets his wish (a distinct possibility), given that Republicans have the discipline to hold their nose and vote their hatred, I believe he’s got a shot.
I think that if we can elect a President with the middle name Hussein, there would be no problem with Devi.
If she pivoted to emphasize her law enforcement background, and embraces the likely upcoming Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, current polls wouldn’t, I think, be predictive.
…I think the TLDR on this thread is that it doesn’t matter who the GOP put up as the candidate for the next election, they are going to be a threat. They will rally behind whomever gets through the primary.
Just…don’t play into that game. If Biden wants another term then let him run. He’s the Dems best chance. If he doesn’t run? The Dem bench thread a few weeks ago suggests things get orders of magnitude more difficult. But either way, every election for the foreseeable future is going to be run on a knife-edge. And the thing is, the Dems can’t afford to loose. Ever. We are already seeing shenanigans in the House. They’ve already lost the Supremes for a generation. Lose the Senate and/or the Presidency? They get to finish the job they started under Trump.
Would it have, though? It was all “out there” with Trump and nothing moved the needle away from him at all in 2016; indeed, the more the Democrats revealed Trump to be a horrible human being, the more determined his base were to vote for him to “own the libs”.
This will make DeSantis popular in lots of quarters.
…
[Donald] Dillbeck, who was killed as punishment for fatally stabbing a woman named Faye Vann, was the first person executed in Florida since 2019.
The timing of his execution appears to be part of a push by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to bring back death sentences by non-unanimous juries. DeSantis, who is expected to run for president, signed Dillbeck’s death warrant last month on the same day that he floated changing state law to allow non-unanimous juries to impose death sentences. “Maybe eight out of 12 have to agree or something,” DeSantis suggested at a Florida Sheriffs Association conference, just before ordering the execution of a man with that exact jury split.
…
This is pretty much the game plan for any R candidate in the primaries - anything the Democrats propose as policy, just come out strongly to the opposite position and watch the libs howl. It’s like crack for R voters, and will definitely draw attention. DeSantis has been practicing this strategy already, with the whole bussing asylum-seekers north bit. It wont matter if the D idea is good for the nation (like more safety standards for freight rail), just come out against it and propose a policy that’s the exact opposite (less safety standards for freight rail), and as long as there is complaining and crying by Democrats, you’ll score points. Whomever is best at owning the libs will get the nomination.
Guaranteed? Quick. What do you know about the stock market in November 2024?
Forget DeSantis. The really interesting battle will be Nikki Haley against President Kamala Harris. Two brown women. The spectacle of millions of heads exploding.
Well, it’s going to be Biden, unless he’s deceased or incapacitated.
I think it moved to the right in the 1990s with Clinton being a right-of-center Democrat (Sister Soulja, welfare reform, and all that). If there is evidence it has moved to the right since then, I would like to see it (I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong).
He doesn’t look like a centrist at all, since he is purposely and explicitly engaging in antics to appeal to the Trumpist/wingnut base. I think the trafficking of migrants was a bridge too far. It can’t be spun as anything other than cruel and right-wing in nature, and in the general election he will be called out for it again and again.
I read dailykos.com and follow such polls as they post on this, such as Trump’s current approval rating among the GOP, focus groups talking about Trump, etc. He’s clearly lost support, but looking at this poll on 538, his favorability has been hovering around 41% for about two years:
I certainly don’t think he can win a general election again. But he’s definitely strong enough to hurt DeSantis in the primary. If he does a third party run, that would of course be a nuclear bomb on the GOP’s prospects.
Isn’t that a chaos agent? I think there’s also his classic authoritarianism and fascism. The nazi right loves his cruelty to the Other (especially migrants) and would love for him to be dictator.
Good point. DeSantis would make a better nazi than Trump because of his ability to plan and act rationally, but as I said above, DeSantis is more of a Himmler and definitely not a Hitler.
Getting Trump out of the picture will be very much to his advantage–almost a necessary condition of success.
Trump was chaotic because he had no clue what he was doing. As a side effect, this served to troll and antagonize libs, and the right loved that about him.
Of course there are some on the right who truly do want the government destroyed, and some who think they want that. Some of those people actually hate Trump and only love him as a chaos agent. But I think those people are the minority.
Conservatives see themselves as eternal victims and underdogs, so what they want most is someone who “fights back” against the libs. They tolerate chaos to the extent that it antagonizes the libs, but I think conservatives would rally behind someone who is more ideologically coherent, more baggage-free, and capable of wielding government power. And someone who would routinely come up with ways to cause libs outrage and anxiety, but in a more targeted and strategic manner.
In that regard I really do think DeSantis could be the successor to Trump. But I don’t think anybody can defeat Trump outright; I think DeSantis is secretly hoping for the same thing many of us have been praying for since the 2016 election.
I do know that whoever is elected President in 2024 doesn’t take office until noon on January 20, 2025 so I’m pretty confident Biden will still be President through November 2024, December 2024 and most of January 2025.
Certainly another key group among U.S. conservatives, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, see themselves as being persecuted by the broader American society, and believe that restrictions on their religious liberty are underway.
As several others have already pointed out, there is no guarantee that an aging, sick Biden will still be President at the time of the election. He may resign. He may die. The cabinet may use the 25th Amendment on him. Many bad things are unfortunately likely to happen to an 80-year-man in an extreme high stress job.
Assuming that Biden will obviously serve out his term is as bad as assuming you know where the stock market will be in 20 months. I’m not “pretty confident” about it. I’m scared down to my socks. Which was the entire point of my post.
