Let me say at the start that I didn’t want Trump in 2016 or in 2020, and I certainly don’t want him as president again. But looking at how things are going, I think if he chooses to run in 2024 he will quite likely win again.
Why? Well first of all, if he seeks the nomination I think hardly any Republican will run against him, and any who try will probably be dispatched as easily as he dispatched all his primary opponents last time. It is always a mistake to underestimate one’s opponents, as both Republicans and Democrats did in 2016. The man is an unprincipled sociopath, but he is absolutely brilliant at dominating the national media (who cooperate because his daily outrages make news and drive readership), and at persuading and reading the mood of his base – much, much better than any opponent he has faced thus far, as Scott Adams pointed out during the 2016 election.
If he runs, who will he likely run against? Biden was appealing in 2020 because he carried no major baggage. As vice president to Obama he was largely invisible, and his handlers kept him mostly under wraps during the 2020 campaign, a smart move since he has always been gaff-prone and clearly has lost a step or two as he has aged. Against Trump’s mishandling of the COVID pandemic, and the media’s obvious bias toward him (like suppressing Tara Reade’s sexual assault charge against him) Biden was in a good place. Yet even so Biden just barely won the election. Yes, he did well in the popular vote, but it is the electoral vote that counts, and he won that by the slimmest of margins in a few swing states. And if COVID hadn’t hit, Trump would most likely have won again on a growing economy and rising wages.
But Biden this time, 84 by the time 2024 arrives, will carry all the baggage that a sitting president always accumulates – blame for everything that goes wrong, whether it was his fault or not, and disillusionment among his base that he didn’t deliver everything he promised in his campaign.
If Biden, for whatever reason, doesn’t run for re-election in 2024, the obvious replacement will be his vice president, Kamala Harris. Given the current progressive movement in the Democratic party it would be hard to refuse a mixed-race woman vice president the nomination if she wanted it. But as she first showed in her painfully inept campaign in 2020, and subsequently in her performance thus far as vice-president in charge of the border crisis, she simply isn’t up to the job yet, and may never be. It’s not that she isn’t smart, it’s that she appears to have no political sense – she appears not to know how to play the media or work the political systems or appeal broadly to a base, or apparently (according to some insiders) even run a staff. Not surprising, since being a Stanford economics professor doesn’t really prepare one for this sort of thing. Trump would likely make a meal of her in a media-dominated election.
And the 2022 midterm election probably won’t help. Historically the president’s party almost always loses Congressional seats in the first midterm election, and the Democratic margin in both the House and the Senate is so thin that losing just a seat or two would be enough to tip the balance and completely stall the progressive legislative agenda. Just the redistricting exercise about to start will probably deliver an additional seat or two in the House to the Republicans.
So the Democratic candidate will probably have few recent legislative achievements to run on in 2024.
Now consider the issues that are likely to shape the 2024 election: rising inflation, rising crime rates along with the unpopular ‘defund the police” movement, increased illegal immigration across the Southern border, the fight over Critical Race Theory in schools, the fight over mask mandates, especially for school children, and the fallout from our Afghanistan withdrawal. These are all issues that animate the Republican base and mostly put Democratic policies on the defensive.
Of course, as I have said before, a week is eternity in politics, and all sorts of unexpected events before November 2024 could completely change the environment. But from where we are now, I would guess that if Trump runs in 2024 he is quite likely to win again. He is clearly maintaining his base and continuing to position himself for a run, if he is healthy enough when the time comes.
Not comforting, but a reality to deal with.
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