Despite the noise, nothing about the 2024 election has changed: Trump will lose.
Trump will come close again, but the corrupt, pay-to-play Democratic turnout machine combined with a recovering economy will carry the day.
I love the sport of politics: who’s up, who’s down, who’s got pole position, who might close hard like British Fleet in the stretch. It’s August 9, 2023, fifteen months before the next U.S. Presidential election. At this time in 2016, Jeb Bush was the runaway Republican favorite. At this time in 2020, few had a clue who would get the Democratic nod, but conventional punditry said it would surely not be the aged, gaffe-prone, and schmaltzy Joseph Robinette Biden. Yet here we are: the geriatric winners of the respective 2016 and 2020 elections, Trump and Biden, are poised to square off again in 2024 in an Ali-Vs.-Frazier-style rematch.
Figuratively speaking, that is. The Frazier in this matchup will be stowed away in a Delaware beach manse, fending off calls to testify in his Senate impeachment trial for a pay-to-play scheme involving the Ukrainian energy concern Burisma and his obstruction of the investigation into it. The mouthy Ali will be out on bail in four separate trials that cover his conduct before becoming President, while being President, and after being President. Conviction in at least one of those cases is 100% certain in the next year. Meanwhile, a third candidate on the No Labels ticket will be gaining traction in key swing states, threatening to prevent either major party nominee from closing the deal in the Electoral College.
Yet, even with all that trauma, drama, and palace intrigue, the American electorate will return to form. As the website PredictIt again confirmed this week, Joe Biden will win reelection in 2024. Here are the ineluctable reasons why from my work deep inside The Swamp and on several political campaigns:
1. Democrats control media, social media, search, entertainment, fashion, and more. Biden's sundry scandals will get almost no traction. His pay-to-play schemes are real and criminal, but it won't make a difference since the DNC’s mass media arm will block, ignore, or censor all that, just as they did in the lead-up to the 2020 election. As a result, the mainstream electorate, already Balkanized, will not be dialed in. Absent voter pressure, the Senate will not convict. Democrats are so Trump-deranged they would not even convict Biden if he sold nuclear secrets to the Chinese.
2. Trump's four indictments will turn off a meaningful number of independents in key swing states. There is also a sizable portion of Republicans who will never forgive Trump for January 6 and thus not vote for him under any circumstance, even if it means keeping the government in the hands of open-border, soft-on-crime proto-Socialists. That’s a disastrous one-two punch, even with Biden’s anemic polling.
3. The No Labels ticket––likely to be announced this coming April––will hurt Republicans and Democrats equally, contrary to Democratic fears. While the third-party candidacies of Gary Johnson (Libertarian) and Jill Stein (Green Party) were key to Trump’s narrow winning margins in 2016, Trump will never reach the 46% popularity he had in 2016, making third-party candidacies less impactful.
The Green Party, even with charismatic Professor Cornell West as its possible standard-bearer, will not steal sufficient votes in key swing states to cost Biden the election. “Brother” West could garner up to 10% of the vote in Socialist-leaning California, Oregon, and Washington, but not enough to risk a Democratic defeat. Given Biden and Trump’s nearly dead-even status in polling, the popular and electoral vote count disparity will be much closer in 2024 than in 2020, but not close enough. Biden will squeak it out. And Trump, on cue, will deny the results: a key reason that critical moderates in his party will never vote for him. Who needs the drama?
4. The Democratic get-out-the-vote machine is massive, impressively financed, and outrageously effective. Just see the 2022 midterms to learn how Democrats can leverage their single winning issue––in that case, abortion rights––to snatch a Senate majority from the jaws of likely defeat. The Senate map is much more daunting for Democrats in 2024, so don’t expect a repeat of 2022. Republicans, however, talk a good game about waking up to the realities of ballot harvesting and mass mail-in voting, but the Democrats remain light-years ahead on both fronts. Plus, they will significantly out-fundraise Republicans, which allows them to buy off votes in ingenious ways.
A Democratic presidential campaign is filled with all sorts of paid make-work jobs for door-knockers, mass texters, phone callers, bus drivers, leafleters, ballot collectors, ballot helpers, you name it. It’s Christmas all year long. As 2020 proved, paid Democratic workers will fudge or break every state legislative voting rule in order to expand “the franchise.” The RNC can’t match that drive, funding, or chicanery. And they are not there on the ground in major cities where most of the rule-breaking and lawbreaking occurs.
The best thing Trump could do would be to hold massive rallies in the most crime-ridden areas of Democrat-run Atlanta, Detroit, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Phoenix––which are the largest cities in the six key swing states––and leave behind a get-out-the-vote and surveillance infrastructure that will closely monitor how voting is done. Then he’d have a shot. But he won’t. So, the Dems will control, unchecked, voting in the inner city and, thus, the election.
5. Claims of Republican inroads with suburban women, blacks, and Hispanics are overrated. It’s more Fox News fantasy projection than dependable reality. With suburban women, Republicans are popular on parental rights, identity indoctrination in schools, and public safety, but they are on the wrong side of abortion. For most women, abortion rights are still their number one issue. And with Trump at the top of the ticket, after losing a sexual harassment claim in New York, the GOP’s purported suburban women advantage is canceled out. As in yesterday’s abortion referendum in Trump-friendly Ohio, Democratic women come out of the woodwork when abortion is on the ballot.
The crisis of Biden’s deliberately open border is starting to break through with some urban black voters jealous of the benefits given to illegal immigrants as urban communities suffer under the twin burdens of lawlessness and single-parent households. There is also Trump’s bling-y billionaire appeal to some black men. But black women’s near-universal hatred of Trump will be impossible to overcome. Black women are the most vocal of the anti-Trump constituency. They will drive an over 90% game-day black voting bloc to Biden. If hapless Kamala Harris ends up being the Democratic nominee, even more so.
Choosing African-American Tim Scott as Trump’s VP will not change this equation one jot. In today’s racialized Democratic Party, every black Republican is automatically deemed an “Uncle Tom,” even though it was the Republican Party who fought against Democrat-run slavery and Jim Crow. It’s sick and twisted, but that’s how it is.
As for Hispanics, this is not a lockstep monolithic coalition. Hispanic voters in Florida are primarily of Cuban descent and inclined to vote against any candidate that evokes the tyrannical excesses of Socialism and Communism. In short, anything that reeks of Castro, which is today’s Democratic Party. Florida will remain solidly Republican.
But Hispanics in the key swing states of Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada––who are primarily of Mexican and Central American descent––don’t think that way. For them, America is not the values proposition it is to the Cubans of Florida. It’s a place to get a better-paying job. For them, America is not so much a country, as a market. So, the open border very much appeals to this Hispanic constituency, which is why the Biden Administration, in stark contradiction to the Democratic Centrist administration of Bill Clinton, keeps the border open, under-funds Border Patrol and ICE, and deploys the disastrous policy of catch and release. The Southwest will reelect Joe Biden precisely because of the open border.
7. Due to Biden’s war on natural gas, Trump might win gas-rich Pennsylvania. And if he smartly picks popular Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin as his VP, he could come close in Old Dominion. Even if he wins both states, however, he will still lose the election because of Biden’s superior operations in Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
Trump will come close again, but the corrupt, pay-to-play Democratic turnout machine combined with a recovering economy will carry the day. Get used to it, MAGA.