No can dispute that the 2024 Presidential campaign – already underway for a year – is unusual, if not unique. For one, we have a former President running as challenger for the first time since Teddy Roosevelt’s third-party run of 1912. For another, that challenger is unique, both by virtue of his past actions as President (inciting an insurrection; watching a million citizens die from a pandemic) and his actions beyond and subsequent to holding that office (recent civil rape judgement; mishandling highly classified documents and refusing legally binding requests to return same; regular provocation of stochastic terror; continuing legal judgements and press revelations of financial shenanigans).
Considering in particular the odd “who knows where we go from here?” media coverage of Trump’s always-inevitable romp through the Republican primaries, political horse-race focus on the narrow or negative margin for Biden in national polls, and widespread Democratic angst about same, I wanted to note that we are not running the last campaign; 2024 is not and cannot be 2016.
That year, let us recall, saw the H. Clinton campaign more or less chortling with glee at the prospect of running against Trump. This turned out to be a bad misjudgement of the risks, in both magnitude and geography – see, e.g., Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. Establishment Republicans, meanwhile, showed deep concern at first, were dragged around only reluctantly to supporting Trump, and ended up shocked and pleased at their good fortune, and happily (early 2017) making plans for gargantuan new tax cuts and the final suborning of the judiciary.
This year, by contrast, sees even never-Trump Republicans reconciling themselves to Trump as standard bearer once more, while Democrats fret at the near-invulnerability of Trump polling in the face of all of the above-mentioned issues. In this sense, everyone is treating 2024 as if it’s 2016.
But it’s not. In fact, I wonder if the Trump that Democrats are facing in 2024 isn’t in fact the Trump that Clinton (and many Dems) thought they were facing in 2016: So demonstrably unsuited to the office that his winning a majority of votes – or electors – is effectively impossible, making the election a cake-walk.
Granted, as evidence I can point only to the barely-50% of die-hard Republican primary voters who have voted in his support in Iowa and New Hampshire. And the national polls have not been going anywhere. But as the polls and focus groups continue to emphasize, until now, almost none of the independents in these polls has believed that Trump was going to be the Republicans’ Presidential nominee. And once they realize he is – if I am right – that will all start to change.
The one-on-one campaign itself – every day of it – also promises to be very different. Trump’s election-rally-as-narcissistic-ego-boost shtick has worn thin, he regularly hallucinates himself into bizarre alternate realities, and he will continue to show up regularly in courtrooms where it only takes a single thwack of the judge’s gavel to slap him down (not very dominant).
I would not say optimism, much less insouciance, is warranted. But I do know it’s going to be different.
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