4/8/24
Yours truly is at least as convinced as ever that the 2024
presidential election will not be a Trump/Biden contest, a position I first
advanced in print in my now seminal 11/18/23 post 2024
WILL NOT BE A BIDEN VS. TRUMP RACE.
Since, barring something legal or physical intervening, Donald Trump
will be the GOP nominee, what I am arguing is that it is increasingly clear
that the Democrats are going to dump President Biden at or just before their
convention in Chicago in August.
Things look bad for Mr. Biden. Many, probably most, people who follow these
things closely, and an even larger percentage of those who don’t, seem to think that Mr. Trump will win the November
race if he is facing the increasingly unpopular Mr. Biden and his, mirabile
dictu, even less highly regarded Vice-President. Even yours
truly is now admitting that Mr. Trump has a decent chance of getting elected in
November, provided he is facing Mr. Biden.
(For the relatively rapid evolution of my views on this subject, see my
1/18/24 post WHY
THE GOP IS “IN A WHOLE HEAP OF TROUBLE.”)
Why has the thinking regarding this election tilted so
sharply toward Mr. Trump in the last month or so? There are the polls. The latest Wall Street Journal poll,
taken about a week ago, showed Mr. Trump leading Mr. Biden in six of the seven
states that seemingly will decide the election.
In the seventh, Wisconsin, the two estimables who at this point lead
their parties are tied. But the polls have
shown Mr. Trump with a slight lead both nationally and in key states for
months; the change in the last poll has been only one of degree.
More important, at least to yours truly, are the
conversations I am having with people from across the political spectrum. This
admittedly anecdotal evidence is not quite like the similar data I collected in
2016
that enabled me to call the election for Mr. Trump. Back then, very few people were admitting
that they would vote for Mr. Trump. In 2024,
more people are admitting, in many cases boasting, that they will vote for
Trump. More importantly, however, a
large number of people with whom I speak or otherwise communicate are still not
willing to admit that they will vote for Mr. Trump but are quite adamant about
not voting for Mr. Biden. These conversations
usually go something like this…
“I don’t want to sound like some kind of Trumper, but….”
and then launch into a laundry list of things that the
speakers doesn’t like about what’s going on in the country. Phrases like “fed up” and “have had it,” are
prevalent, though not always in sentences that use the first person as the
subject. Then the conversation tends to
trail off and never quite gets to “…so I’m voting for Trump.” This year, I get the sense that people are omitting
the part about voting for Mr. Trump not, as in 2016, because they have already
decided to do so but are afraid to admit it but because they, like yours truly
and many who think like me, don’t want to,
and, in many cases won’t, vote for Mr. Trump but sure as hell are not going to
vote for Mr. Biden.
What are people fed up about? With what have they had it? Lots of things: high prices, high interest rates, the geopolitically
precarious position our nation faces, crime, being told they’re idiots by
idiots, and, most commonly and most saliently, illegal immigration and the
border. As yours truly pointed out
in the aforementioned
1/18/24 post, if Mr. Trump is to win this election, it will be on the immigration
issue and he will have Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who made the problem
very real for everybody in this country, to thank.
Besides these encounters with people who won’t vote for
Mr. Biden, there are also reports of the increasing whispers and such from “sources”
in the Democratic Party expressing doubts regarding Mr. Biden’s ability to win
re-election. These sources are either unnamed
or are, either actually or ostensibly, so far removed from power that their
utterances are allowed to make their way into the mainstream press. In either case, these voices are growing in
volume and in breadth.
The Democrats see the deep fissures the Middle East are
causing in their Party. They see the polls
showing the small, but big enough, erosion in Black, Hispanic, and youth
support for Mr. Biden. They see the
physical and mental deterioration that age has inflicted on their standard-bearer. As much as they hate Governor Abbott, they see that he has made the
illegal immigration problem both close and present for the entire country,
denying the Democrats the ability to pontificate on this issue from a thousand
miles away while presenting a relative handful of border communities with the bill
for their virtue signalling. Mostly, though, the Democrats see a President
in whom the country has lost faith and confidence. They can see how tough it will be to win
with this guy, even against Mr. Trump, and they simply can’t fathom a second
Trump term, especially a term in which the prospect of re-election puts no restraints
on Mr. Trump. They will, or have, come
to think “Why take the chance?”
Conservatives often say that in America we are faced with
a choice between the evil party and the stupid party, and we are most certainly
correct in that observation. And the
Democrats may be a lot of things, but they are not stupid. So what will the Democrats do? Despite its name, the Democrats are the
less democratic of the two parties, at least when it comes to presidential
nominees. One can be forgiven, and
perhaps lauded for paying attention, if one were to argue that the proverbial
fix was in for Mr. Biden in 2020, Ms. Rodham-Clinton in 2016, and Mr. Obama in
2008. One could make the same argument regarding
Hubert Humphrey’s nomination in 1968. What
with all the superdelegates and such, the opinions of Democratic primary voters
have had little to do with choosing the Party’s nominees. While the most egregious aspects of the
superdelegate system have been mitigated, the “powers-that-be,” whoever they are,
still are likely to decide who gets the Democratic nomination. Yes, Mr. Biden wants the nomination, but he
will be made to understand that it is up to the Party, not Mr. Biden, to decide
who gets to carry its standard into the 2024 elections. The whispers will no longer be
whispers. Friends of Joe may remain
friends, but their political allegiance will dissipate as it becomes more clear
that a Biden nomination means a return of the man whom the Democrats loathe above
all others. With the help of these
friends of Joe, Mr. Biden will decide that, at the age of 81, it is time to
spend more time with his family. And
the Democrats, once it is officially determined that Mr. Trump is the GOP
nominee (or maybe more energetically if, somehow, Mr. Trump is NOT the GOP nominee.),
will nominate somebody else.
Yes, there will be the “Kamala problem,” but the
Democrats are smart and will find some way around that. Then
they will go about the business of installing a nominee sufficiently generic
that s/he can run not as whoever s/he is but, rather, purely as the candidate
who is not Donald Trump and will make sure that the right to an abortion is maintained
and expanded. No Biden/Harris baggage,
just “I’m not Donald Trump and I’ll do everything I can to insure reproductive
rights.” That may or may not be the winning
formula, but it is starting to look like Biden/Harris is the losing formula.
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