Back in 2012, when the latest Republican Establishment candidate lost the popular vote and the Electoral College (Republicans don’t ever win the popular vote anymore; they rely on our archaic constitutional provisions to impose their candidates on an unwilling electorate) I predicted that for the next election, the Republican base would demand that the party go full whackjob, which they did. Even Mr. S., who I wrote about here, will back me up on this. Recall, that just about every 2016 candidate in the mix was a whackjob; the “moderate” candidates went nowhere (remember Jeb!), and the biggest whackjob of them all came out on top.
So, what’s in store for 2024?
Yesterday I read this at the Palmer Report. Again, to emphasize, their facts are usually right though you must take the conclusions they draw from those facts with massive piles of salt:
Donald Trump’s favorability rating is down to 32% in new NBC polling. This helps confirm other recent polling showing Trump bottoming out. It means he’s completely non-viable. You can’t win a national election with just your base; they’re always too small. Trump has little left but his base. It’s why lost badly in 2020, and why he isn’t a serious consideration for 2024.
Trump was able to pull it off in 2016 because there were still enough somewhat non-insane Republicans willing to give him their votes despite their reservations, because, after all, Hillary. The numbers above show, I think, that not only have these people left Trump, but they’ve also likely left the Republican Party.
What follows, by the way, assumes that Chuck Schumer will somehow find a way to get through to Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema and get them to help pass HR-1. If we don’t end voter suppression then all bets are off.
Again, assuming that voter suppression is somehow stopped, how exactly can Republicans approach 2024. That 32% is their hard core base, and at that point those people will likely be among the suppressed if the party fails to nominate someone sufficiently whacky. The voter suppression laws are certainly aimed at Democrats, but they are also making it harder for everyone to vote, and if these people are not sufficiently inspired by a Whackjob Supreme, they are quite likely to just stay home. So, initially this brings up an interesting question. What current Republican politician has the necessary blend of conspiracy driven talking points and showmanship to appeal to these folks? There are lots of pretenders to the throne, but folks like Cruz and Hawley just don’t have what it takes. They can dish out the hate with the best of them, but they can’t entertain the way Trump did. In addition, which of them is capable of entertaining the meatheads and, at the same time, giving a sufficient number of semi-rational people a reason to add their votes to the meatheads? They won’t have Hillary to kick around, the Hunter Biden thing never stuck, and, assuming that Biden sticks to his guns and doesn’t run again, they will likely be unable to make anything stick against whoever runs for the Democrats because everyone but the Fox faithful pretty much discounts everything they say. Trump himself, in my opinion, won’t be coming back. Even if he’s not in jail by then, he’s a psychologically beaten man, and I doubt he’d be able to rev them up in 2024 like he could in 2016. He wasn’t even that good at it in 2020.
The reality is that it will be almost impossible for the Republicans to win a fairly run presidential election in 2024. That’s why they have concluded they must steal it. Rather than taking the constitutional route of simply returning the choice of electors to the legislatures, they prefer to maintain the pretense that the electorate actually has a voice. So, consistent with a decades long pattern, they will do precisely what they have baselessly accused the Democrats of doing this year: they will steal the election, or at least try to do so.
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