Are Republicans Delusional About 2024

While, as noted in a prior post, Fox News and the lies and falsehoods it disseminates remain threat to democracy,  it also maintains a bubble where viewers and much of the GOP base remain untethered from objective reality and are encouraged to cling to their hatreds and prejudices and never falargely crushed. ce the reality that they are outliers and not in touch with mainstream America.  This is important because it will shape the GOP 2024 presidential primary contest and could result in the nomination oof a diminished Donald Trump or some other candidate - think Ron DeSantis - who has so pandered to the MAGA base and extremists that winning enough of the political center to win the election may prove impossible.  Add to this the furthert doubling down against abortion by Republicans at the state level and 2024 could be a reprise of the 2022 mid-terms where Republican dreams and fantasies were largely crushed.  A piece in Politico by the editor in chief of the conservative National Review lays out why Republicans could prove to be delusional about their prospects in 2024.  Here are column excerpts:

At this juncture, no one else in the country is as likely to be president of the United States come January 2025 as Joe Biden. Republicans telling themselves otherwise are engaged in self-delusion.

There was a palpable sense during the midterms that Republicans were playing with house money — in other words, that the political environment was so favorable that they could afford to make poor choices and still succeed. That was a mistake last year, and absent something terrible befalling Biden or the country over the next two years, is a mistake when thinking about 2024.

Biden is not a dead man walking; he’s an old man getting around stiffly. Biden is vulnerable, but certainly electable; diminished, but still capable of delivering a message; uninspiring, but unthreatening.

No one is going to mistake him for a world-beater. In the RealClearPolitics polling average, he leads Donald Trump by a whopping 0.8 percent. . . . That said, he’s in the office, and no one else is. Incumbency bestows important advantages. The sitting president is highly visible, is the only civilian in the country who gets saluted by Marines walking out his door every day, has established a certain threshold ability to do the job, and can wield awesome powers to help his cause and that of his party.

Since 1992, Trump is the only incumbent to have lost, failing to join Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama as re-elected incumbents.

Biden was never going to be the next LBJ or FDR as a cadre of historians had seemingly convinced him early in his presidency. But he punched above his weight legislatively during his first two years, getting more out of a tied Senate and slender House majority than looked realistically possible. He’s set up to have the advantage in this year’s momentous debt-limit fight, since it’s hard to see how congressional Democrats aren’t united and congressional Republicans divided.

Biden’s age is a liability for him, but comes with a significant benefit — he does not look or sound like a radical any more than the average elderly parent or grandparent. This has enabled him to govern from the left — he would have spent even more the first two years if he could have — without appearing threatening or wild-eyed. He hasn’t restored normality to Washington so much as familiarity as the old hand who has been there since 1973 and made his first attempt at national office in 1988.

Importantly, in 2024, nothing Biden does will be considered in isolation, but instead compared to his Republican opponent. As of now, Trump has the best odds of being, once again, that adversary. Trump would have some significant chance of beating Biden, simply by virtue of being the Republican nominee, and there’s always a chance that events could be Biden’s undoing.

But Trump would probably be weaker going into a rematch than the first time around. He lost to Biden in 2020 — before he denied the results of a national election, before a fevered band of his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, before he indulged every 2020 conspiracy theory that came across his desk, before he said the Constitution should be suspended and before he made his primary campaign partly about rebuking traditional Republicans that the GOP suburbanites he’d need in a general election probably still feel warmly about.

There’s also a strong possibility that Trump gets indicted once, or even twice, in coming months. Such charges would be perceived as unfair by Republicans — perhaps rightly so — but they would add to the haze of chaos around Trump.

Ron DeSantis or another Republican contender presumably matches up better against Biden, based on the generational contrast and the absence of Trump’s baggage alone. Yet, if a non-Trump candidate wins the nomination, he or she will have Trump in the background, probably determined to gain revenge against him or her.

Then, there’s the state of the GOP generally. It has an impressive crop of governors. Otherwise, it hasn’t seemed to take on board the lessons of the last couple of years. First, there’s a real chance that it will re-nominate Trump, after everything. Second, various state parties are irresistibly drawn to politically toxic, proven losers.

There’s no fortune quite like being lucky in your enemies, and Biden could well get a big break in this respect yet again. However much Republicans may wish he were a pushover, he’s not, and they should be acting accordingly.