Donald Trump - Biden's Silver Bullet to Re-election

As a former Republican chairwoman friend used to say years ago, the purpose of political parties is to elect candidates to office.  Today's Republican Party has completely lost sight of this reality and has increasingly become a cult of Donald Trump and his mini-me's.  Fealty to Der Trumpenfuhrer overrides all else and whether or not Trump is electable is nowhere in the calculation.   A column in the Washington Post by a "conservative" columnist I rarely agree with on anything lays out the case that if Republicans are insane enough to nominate Trump as their presidential standard bearer in 2024 they will virtually guarantee Joe Biden's re-election.  Outside of the MAGA and far right media bubble, Trump is simply too toxic to too many voters yet all indications are that Republican primary voters are deaf and blind to this reality.  The best way to turn out Democrat and Independent voters to back Biden is to make the choice one between Biden and Trump.   It is remarkable that Republicans simply cannot see that TrumpHere are column excerpts:

As he announces his reelection campaign, President Biden is extremely vulnerable. According to NBC News polling out this week, his disapproval rating is at 54 percent (just two points shy of his all-time high) while a whopping 70 percent of Americans say they don’t want him to run again. With those numbers, his campaign should be politically dead-on-arrival.

But here’s the problem for Republicans: Sixty percent of voters also don’t want Donald Trump to run again. Americans are sending a clear message to both parties: They want new candidates to choose from in 2024. As Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who helped conduct the NBC poll, explains, “people do not want a Biden-Trump rematch.” But it looks increasingly likely the country will get exactly that.

So, what happens if voters are forced to choose between two candidates they don’t want? A Wall Street Journal poll (conducted by pro-Trump super PAC pollster Tony Fabrizio) suggests the answer: It found that among voters who disapprove of both Trump and Biden, Biden leads Trump by a massive 39 points: 54 percent to 15 percent. Clearly, swing voters who dislike Biden dislike Trump even more.

To beat Biden, Republicans need the votes of the 54 percent majority who disapprove of his performance in office. And Trump appears to be the one candidate who can’t deliver those votes. If Republicans force these voters to choose between Trump and Biden, they will push these voters into a position they don’t want: picking Biden.

Trump is effectively Biden’s “get out of jail free” card — the former president is the one Republican candidate who can save Biden from the political consequences of all the serial disasters he’s unleashed on the country during this term: from the worst inflation in 40 years, . . . the biggest annual rise in food prices since 1979, the worst labor shortages in American history .  . .

That record should doom any president’s chances of winning reelection. But if Trump is the Republican nominee, Biden likely gets away with it. By contrast, if Republicans nominate someone else — almost anyone else — then the GOP can turn Biden’s 54 percent disapproval rating into an albatross around his neck.

It should not take another election loss for Republicans to understand this. Swing voters have already sent this message to the GOP — twice. In 2020, despite the fact that a record 56 percent of registered voters told Gallup that they were better off under Trump than they had been four years earlier, Trump lost — because he alienated too many people.

Then, in 2022, Biden turned in nearly the best first midterm performance of any president since John F. Kennedy — despite being the most unpopular U.S. president since Harry S. Truman. (He was exceeded only by George W. Bush’s midterm results after the 9/11 attacks.) Democrats didn’t do so well because voters approved of Biden; it was because they disapproved of Trump’s handpicked House and Senate candidates, who lost winnable race after winnable race.

So, Trump has already cost the GOP two elections. Will it take a third for some to wake up to the fact that he is political kryptonite?

So, Republicans have a choice: Pick a candidate without Trump’s baggage who can make Biden own his 54 percent disapproval rating. Or hold Biden’s beer while he shows us if he can make a second term in office even more calamitous than his first.

Frankly, I do not see the GOP base as capable of making such a reasoned decision to not nominate Trump.  The GOP is now the MAGA party where reason and common sense (and common decency) simply do not matter.

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