(I thought these share links from The Atlantic were gift links, but maybe not. Sorry.)
The Republican plan for 2024 is already failing, and the party leadership can see it and knows it.
There was no secret to a more intelligent and intentional Republican plan for 2024. It would have gone like this:
(1) Replace Donald Trump at the head of the ticket with somebody less obnoxious and impulsive.
(2) Capitalize on inflation and other economic troubles.
(3) Offer plausible ideas on drugs, crime, and border enforcement.
(4) Reassure women worried about the post-Roe future.
(5) Don’t be too obvious about suppressing Democratic votes, because really blatant voter suppression will provoke and mobilize Democrats to vote, not discourage them.
…
The big new Republican idea to halt the flow of drugs is to bomb or invade Mexico. Instead of reassuring women, Republican state legislators and Republican judges are signaling that they will support a national abortion ban if their party wins in 2024—and are already building the apparatus of surveillance and control necessary to make such a ban effective. Republican state-level voter-suppression schemes have been noisy and alarming when the GOP plan called for them to be subtle and technical.
It’s early in the election cycle, of course, but not too early to wonder: Are we watching a Republican electoral disaster in the making?
Talk about counter-factuals. Point #2 is about the only thing the current Republican party could actually do without everyone in the party suffering a stroke that completely alters their personality.
#1 - Get rid of Trump? Even if they wanted to, how would they do it? They can’t just ban him from the primaries, and he has a good shot at winning the primaries.
#3-5 are essentially, “Stop being the Modern Republican party”. Sure, if they had better policies, they’d get more votes. We’ve been telling them that for 20 years, and so far they haven’t listened.
It reminds me of all of the hand-wringing and “new party” plans after Obama won reelection in 2012. Remember how they were going to be more inclusive and stop dog-whistling to racists and form a new coalition centered on fiscal conservatism?
Yeah, that’s not exactly how it went… and I see no reason it would be any different now. They found a different “new coalition” that happened to win an election in 2016 (and then lose the next 3 cycles), and they are stuck with it at least until Trump voluntarily leaves the stage.
The Republicans would need to do these things if they want to win. But (as you point out) these are things they will never do. Therefore, they’re heading for electoral disaster again.
WRT “Joe Biden and the runup to the 2024 election,” this is a good thing.
Wouldn’t it have been easier to just frame it as, “These are their policies that are going to cost them the election”, instead of pretending like these changes might be an actual possibility?
We can just choose to rejoice in the slow death of the Republican party without trying to figure out how to save them. Let them die, and let some new party rise to become the new opposition.
Some bad poll results for Biden just came out (non-paywalled MSN.com repost) with lots of negatives for Biden including:
When asked who they would support in 2024, 44 percent of voting-age adults say they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for Trump while 38 percent would definitely or probably vote for Biden. The remaining 18 percent are either undecided or gave another answer.
It’s not a Biden problem, it’s an American problem. In a sane country, Trump wouldn’t poll above 4 percent. We have to accept our sickness, I guess. The rot runs far deeper than most of us would acknowledge before 2016.
It’s certainly not good news, but I suspect the number of people who would never vote for Trump is much higher than those who would never vote for Biden. Trump may well get the GOP nomination, but Biden probably has more paths to an Electoral College majority.
This is why I don’t listen to polls, especially after the last five years. You can find a “representative sample” who think “Spock’s Brain” is the greatest episode of Trek, ever, and that vegemite on sourdough bread should replace the Big Mac. One poll says blue, the other says green.
Meanwhile, Democrats are facing the possibility that Biden may not appear on the ballot for the New Hampshire primary. This after he championed DNC rules changes to make South Carolina the first primary. But NH law requires them to hold their primary a week before any other primary and there’s no way they’re going to change that. So Biden either registers to run in a “rogue primary” or takes the press hit of a no-name Democrat winning the “first in the nation” primary.
I still don’t quite understand how that is supposed to work.
If another state makes a law that it will hold its primary a week before any other, do the two just keep one upping eachother until the primaries were in the past?
I say screw NH. So Biden doesn’t go on the ballot and some nutcase wins the primary. Big deal. Biden still gets the nomination. NH is acting like a spoiled brat, always insisting that they go first and none of its sibling states should ever challenge their God-given right.
Re that CNN link, the idea of not spending too much money early sounds right to me.
The quoted Biden pro-Roe statement on abortion (“I’m not big on abortion, but guess what? Roe v. Wade got it right”) undoubtedly annoys a great many voters who already are determined to vote for Biden no matter what. But the Roe viability standard — in other words, that the great majority of abortions should be legal, but there gets to be a point of unease with abortion, where a woman should no longer should have a right to control her own uterus — is highly popular among swing voters. Whether it was a complete gaffe and mistake, or accurately captures Biden’s views, I don’t know.
