A 2020 Rematch
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| Strap in, patriots. We have malarkey to stop. |
The fight he started with one of the largest and most beloved companies in the world, Disney, is going badly for him, not to mention costing him substantial amounts of political capital. His signing of a six-week abortion ban in the dead of night just cost women in the third-most-populated state in America their reproductive rights.
Unfortunately, the fallout from the Dobbs decision will not be slowing down anytime soon.
The point is that Republicans are realizing that the Florida governor is not ready for prime time, and the indictments leveled against Donald Trump in relation to lying about paying off porn star Stormy Daniels have caused a rally-around-the-flag effect for Republicans concerning the 45th president.
Meanwhile, President Biden has announced he is going to run again for president. His only primary challengers are spiritual author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaxxer crank Robert Kennedy Jr.
It’s obvious what the general election is going to look like:
Biden versus Trump.
It is also obvious which states are going to decide the election—or, put another way, the only states President Biden should be campaigning in: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; possibly add in Virginia or Texas depending on how things go in both states.
I would also recommend that President Biden make several stops in New York to get the situation under control, considering the Empire State’s Democratic Party is in the middle of a civil war with an incompetent party chair, a governor who can’t control her state or party, and a faction of far-left Democrats who are, out of spite, happy to destroy good housing policy along with Long Island Republicans.
Within these states, it is obvious which counties are going to decide how these states swing.
In Wisconsin, for example, the margins in the BOW counties, the WOW counties, Milwaukee County, and Dane County are going to determine Wisconsin’s fate.
In Nevada, the two counties that matter most are Clark and Washoe Counties. The rest can add a margin, but ultimately, these two counties hold 85 percent of the Silver State’s population.
But, of course, a lot has changed since 2020.
COVID-19 is largely in the past, Russia has invaded Ukraine, the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, inflation from COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has hit the global economy hard, China has started a new cold war in earnest, the Supreme Court stole bodily autonomy from half the population, there was an attempted coup by the loser of the 2020 election, and Twitter is on its way down.
All of this will have an impact on the 2024 race.
State of the Race
According to most pundits (myself included), President Biden is the favorite to win.But my thinking has more to do with the 2022 midterms and election results so far in 2023 than polling.
So far being the keywords.
The polling and election results have been off consistently since 2020.
Most pundits (myself included) got 2022 wrong.
I was expecting Republicans to have a net gain of at least 20 seats in the House and quite possibly hold the Senate based on the polling data. My mistakes here were that I severely underestimated the impact of Dobbs, the Republicans’ consistent candidate quality problems, and just how much voters loathe Donald Trump.
Let’s remember what things were looking like at the start of 2022.
Republicans had a fairly successful election season in the fall of 2021, winning the statewide races in Virginia and taking the Virginia House of Delegates. They gained ground in the New Jersey legislature (while coming way too close for comfort in the Garden State’s gubernatorial race) and in Long Island. However you assess his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, it caused his polling numbers to go into a nosedive. Add into this supply chains damaged by COVID-19 causing global inflation (including here at home) plus Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a backlash against Defund the Police taking place nationwide (including here in the Twin Cities), and infighting among Democrats in Washington stalling vital legislation, and you have a situation in which the right Republicans could gain ground in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York.
President Biden’s numbers at the start of 2022 were dire, and they would only get worse at several vital points. Republicans did well in the special elections in early 2022, even flipping a House seat in South Texas.
Typically, when a president’s party is polling poorly before the midterms, the president suffers for it in November. Just ask Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump. The only exceptions before 2022 were 2002 and 1998. A year of rally around the flag after 9/11 and a backlash to Republican overreach into then President Bill Clinton’s sex life, respectively, were responsible for the unusual outcomes those years.
But otherwise, midterms are typically painful for a president, especially when the president is facing the types of headwinds President Biden was facing in 2022.
Low polling numbers, high inflation, global instability, and a media thirst for drama all gave an opening to the Republican Party to do serious damage.
And yet Republicans clearly failed.
A competent Republican Party would have been able to manage the fallout from the Dobbs decision and done better quality control with its candidates. It would not have bet control of the Senate on candidates who have a history of domestic abuse and paying for abortions, an insane retired general, a TV doctor who peddled pseudoscience, and a spoiled brat who had to depend entirely on his family for his political career.
What ultimately handed the Republicans the House in the end was an ongoing Democratic civil war in New York State, a collapse of the Florida Democratic Party, and Democrats underperforming in blue states, especially in California.
For those of you who are wondering the point, it is that if the Republicans underperformed this badly when conditions were quite favorable for them in 2022, they are quite likely to underperform quite seriously in 2024, even with a guaranteed pickup of West Virginia’s Senate seat.
Right now, I put the race at lean Biden, with 2023 results in Virginia, Louisiana, and Kentucky influencing my answers at the end of this year.
We all know what needs to be done.
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