Do you see Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis being elected president in 2024 if he runs?
DeSantis is seen as a 2024 presidential contender.
Seen by whom?
eta: This intrigues me. You post for a reason. Does Putin really think DeSantis is a better tool-to-hand than any of the Trump kids?
I mean, he could be right; I just hadn’t thought about it. Is DeSantis as easy to manipulate as Trump? Not personality-wise, I wouldn’t think, but perhaps Putin has some really good kompromat on DeSantis…?
He seems like the run of the mill Republican to me, much like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Nothing exciting about him. Plus, he will be hammered over keeping the beaches open early on in this pandemic and ads will be played with that drunk, dumbass, red-cheeked kid talking about how he didn’t care if he got the virus because he was too busy fucking partying, bro! (or whatever he said).
So I put him at the 1% mark if he runs.
Wouldn’t Pence be the basically automatic candidate? How often does the sitting VP get jilted?
His wife wants to be a first lady. Look at them. They are the Republican Camelot.
Pence is seen as uncharismatic, unappealing even if he ran. Remember, according to sources, Pence was chosen by Paul Manafort. Manafort is tainted and Pence will have Manafort and Trump’s ties.
No, comrade, but that’s today. 2024 is a long way away, and I don’t even know who that fucker is.
Well, he could turn it around, but the fact that he has the third lowest approval rating in the country for his handling of COVID-19 seems like it might be an impediment.
I clicked “Trump approval” to see that figure per state, and was struck by the result.
All five of the key swing states (FL, WI, MI, PA, NC) showed Trump between 44% and 47%. Every state likely to vote Trump in November was 48% or higher (as was NH, a potential tipping state). Every state likely to vote Biden in November was 43% or lower. (VA, ME, CO were each 43% exactly — scary.)
Does this seem remarkable? I suspect the question could have been “Do you approve of Trump’s handling of XXX?” and the split would have been almost identical to this, for any value of XXX.
Wyoming showed 69%, Hawaii 10%. Do we all really live in the same country?
To answer OP's question, Trump will be re-elected in 2020 but by 2024 the calamities will be so severe and so obvious that the GOP will capitulate, and survive for a few more years only in parts of Flyover-land and the South. A [Seventh Party System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_parties_in_the_United_States) will emerge by the 2030's, probably featuring a centrist Democratic Party and a left-wing Justice Democratic Party.2024 is a long way off, but I don’t see reheated Trumpism as a path to victory.
If there is a strategy here, it’s to help protect his reelection in 2022. The GOP has gotten damn lucky with weak Dem challengers over the past few cycles. And, if he’s looking for reelection in the middle of a deep recession, generic Dem might win.
I don’t doubt that Pence would run but he doesn’t have the pull to make potential candidates hold back and leave it to him. I will be surprised if it wasn’t as crowded as the Democrats were this time.
Hell, he makes Jeb! and L’il Marco look like Rhodes Scholars by comparison. There’s a surfeit of incredibly stupid GOP officeholders, but DeSantis stands out even by that metric.
Bumped.
Florida polling FWIW:
Since the thread is alive once again…
So we can expect him to be the Republican frontrunner? 
DeSantis is doing well on the 'flatter MAGA-cultists and tell them they’re smarter than any doctor or scientist’ front.
He’s doing less well on the 'be close-enough to Openly Racist that the cultists love, you, but in a Plausibly-Deniable manner’ front. He HAS blamed Florida COVID cases on those evil masses of Mexicans pouring over the Mexico/Florida border (*), but he seems to lack Trump’s ability to be off-handedly bigoted and insulting to non-whites.
We shall see.
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*yeah, I know. For more:
I’ve wondered if perhaps the Trump populism thing doesn’t run into a wall with the sheer number of COVID cases in key states. If so, that might bring down Desantis.
Over the longer term, my admittedly vague guess/prediction is that right wing populism (Trumpism) fails, but that this failure won’t necessarily be the end of the right wing nightmare but the beginning. I think that, at some point, the right wing movement will evolve from being a decentralized form of populism to a more virulent brand of ideological extremist fascism. What we forget is that Trumpism is actually devoid of ideological rigidity, which has made it somewhat effective in a society that still has competitive elections. That could change. We could be dealing with a more ideological (radical) brand of right wing extremism in the years ahead.
My personal opinion is that this isn’t the direction the American right wing is moving.
I feel the white supremacists are like the Christian conservatives or the anti-Communist hawks; they’re the rank and file of the American right wing but they’re not the leaders. The leaders of the movement are businessmen who want to have a system which keeps them rich and in power. White power or abortions or the red menace (or immigrants or drug lords or street gangs or terrorists or gay marriages) are just flags they wave to keep the rabble fired up and pointed in the right direction.
Here’s the lessons I feel the right wing has learned from the Trump years:
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No more prima donnas. People will certainly continue to benefit from the system. But maintaining the system itself is more important than any individual. Nobody will be allowed to place their own interests above the interests of the system.
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Tone it down. Go back to dog whistles. Keep things loud enough that it motivates the right wing followers but quiet enough that it doesn’t motivate anti-right wing opposition. The goal is to put people back to sleep.
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Break more laws. I feel conservatives were amazed at how much Trump was able to get away with. They now see that the amount of crime the public is willing to ignore is much larger than they thought. So expect a lot more corruption.
Which is where DeSantis could be very useful to them. He has that ‘F_CK the elites’ touch, but hasn’t (yet) been party to in-your-face corruption scandals.
Of course there’s not much support for journalism in Florida, so there could be a lot of DeSantis-Cashes-In stories that simply haven’t been reported.
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Yeah. If Biden continues to be ‘meh’ about filibuster reform then there will be no federal legislation that will stop GOP states from making voting, essentially, irrelevant.
So ideological flexibility will be less necessary, and a harder-core reliance on scapegoating of immigrants, with a concomitant tolerance for violence against all out-groups (aka everyone not a straight white Christian male) could become normalized.
If voting becomes irrelevant, expect Facebook and the “news” media (broadcast and print) to evolve in a rightward direction. Even MSNBC and the Washington Post will become more entrenched as defenders of Our Sacred Patriots, the Anointed-by-God Wealthy.
Voting will still be relevant until there is real scarcity; it just won’t be equally relevant. We’re heading toward illiberal democracy, which is democracy, but a democracy in which one party has major advantages even if they are at a disadvantage in terms of demography and public opinion. It’s kinda like the basketball game we used to play in the yard called ‘Make it, take it.’
But once real scarcity is introduced into the picture, they will use their power to impose a more militaristic form of control.
Technically true. But if people realize that any vote in, say, Texas, that isn’t a vote for a Republican, is a vote that will be thrown out—in other words, that the ‘winners’ of the election have been decided long before Election Day—then how many people will even bother to vote? And of course we’re not talking about just one state. If it’s known that voting is irrelevant in a dozen or more states, don’t you think that will have a radical effect on voting nationwide?
When everyone realizes that the votes in certain parts of the country will be thrown out if they’re not for the ‘correct’ party, then it won’t matter that genuine elections will still be being run in California and Massachusetts. It just won’t. Democracy in the USA will be over.
I agree that once it’s clear to most Americans that one-party rule is here, there will be plenty of economic failure (and scarcity) and plenty of physical force used to control the populace. Militaristic, indeed—it will be their only option.