Friday, March 15, 2024

COVID In The Rearview Mirror: Could We Really Have Done Things Differently?

It was four years ago this week that COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, setting off a chain of events unlike I ever experienced in my life and unlike anything I had mentally prepared myself to deal with.  Even when global markets began crashing in late February 2020 because of an expectation of vastly diminished economic output, I never expected it would come to months of closed-down stores and stay-at-home mandates for the majority of American workers.  And even by the second week of March, when Italy, among other European nations impacted by the pandemic before us, began locking down to reduce viral spread, it still didn't seem conceivable that the same fate awaited the United States only a week later.  It felt positively surreal wheeling my office chair out of the building on March 17, 2020, preparing to work from home for the foreseeable future and having no sense of what the world would look like on the other side of the lockdown.

Well, here we are four years later and on the other side of those lockdowns initiated in the spring of 2020, and the consensus opinion seems to be that our national response was an overreaction.  Anybody with a basic understanding of human nature could predict that the social isolation, the cessation of education, and abrupt disruption of commerce would have catastrophic downstream consequences, but preservation of human life was deemed the priority and that we would all have to be in it together to sacrifice for the common good.  Was it the right call?  And what did we obviously get wrong that we can learn from if there's a next time?

Looking at it as objectively as possible, I have to acknowledge that few things are particularly obvious and I can't envision any counterfactuals where the worst outcomes of COVID-era lockdown disruption could have been averted.  I've been critical in the past of the epidemiologists for telling half-truths or outright lies on everything from the utility of masks to the efficacy of the vaccine, but it's also hard not to acknowledge that there was a common good to the national psyche for trying to project calm and in attempting to sell a light at the end of the tunnel, even if it required some sleight of hand.

The first such sleight of hand came with the slogan "15 days to flatten the curve", sold by the epidemiological community in March 2020 as something of a vacation for most workers when viral spread was expected to really accelerate.  There was plenty that was not known about the virus when that line was deployed, but everybody in the medical community knew that it would be much, much longer than 15 days before we could even think about getting back to normal.  Should they have been honest with us and told us that from the outset?  Maybe, but I think we've proven ourselves too immature as a people to have dealt rationally with that information.  Indeed, less than a month after the lockdowns began, public protests were already being held demanding that they be lifted.  If people had any sense in mid-March that the lockdowns would extend as long as they did, a public uprising would likely have arisen at the very time when it would have been the most costly in terms of viral spread.

As for masking, the messaging from the epidemiological community was even more incoherent.  For at least a month, they discouraged masking, insistent that no good could come from it.  Instead, we were walking around the supermarket mask-free but then scrubbing the groceries when we got home to "get the virus off". Then at some point in the second half of April, an abrupt and awkward pivot began where the same people who had shrugged off masking began to aggressively embrace it, ultimately to the point of recommending mandates for the very accessory they assured us was useless only a month or so earlier.  As sketchy as this seemed, it may still have been defensible as mask supply in March 2020 was nowhere near what the demand would be if the virologists had told us from the outset that masks were useful.  Was it better to count on the lockdown itself limiting viral spread during the interim period where mask supply was shored up, and thus allowing the masks to be readily available at the time when the world started to open up a little?  Probably, but with a considerable qualifier that trust lost is hard to get back, a theme that kept repeating throughout the pandemic.

As the spring of 2020 progressed, some patterns became clear on the demographics of people who were most vulnerable to the virus, and children and young adults were not among them.  Many of them were becoming understandably restless and wondered aloud why they were on indefinite house arrest as opposed to simply protecting people at greatest risk of the virus.  The explanation we always got was that it would be impossible to shield the vulnerable securely enough if the virus was running rampant among all demographics.  This was indisputably true, but the longer the lockdown went on, the tougher it became to sell that cost-benefit assessment, particularly as it applied to schoolchildren going multiple months without in-person education. 

This remains the hardest aspect of the COVID era to parse one way or another when reflecting upon our response.  On one hand, even though the virus didn't prove as deadly to as many people as originally feared, there were more than a million deaths linked to it!  That was a considerably larger number than the worst of our fears in March and April 2020, rendering any attempt to downplay the severity of the virus to be dubious hind-sight. On the other hand, would things really have been worse if we'd green-lit younger and healthier people to live freely and frontload the spread of the virus?  Would more people have ultimately died amidst steeper spikes of viral spread?  Or did all of the people who would have died earlier ultimately end up dying later since the virus outlasted all lockdowns?  

It would be helpful if there were any consistent numbers, at home or abroad, to quantify whether a looser or tighter lockdown yielded better results, but there aren't.  States and nations with the most aggressive approaches ended up having no better or worse outcomes that states and nations with the most relaxed approaches. With that in mind, it's easy to decry in retrospect that the lockdowns were all for nothing, particularly with the diminished educational outcomes and the epidemics of crime and mental health credibly connected to the prolonged isolation for jurisdictions with the strictest lockdowns.  I'm not fully convinced though.  

Recall that during the hospitalization spikes, our emergency response systems were taxed well beyond their limit in dealing with the tidal wave of sick people coming their way.  If those systems had been taxed even further with even greater numbers of sick people coming all at once, there's reason to believe that in addition to vastly more deaths, it would have done irreparable harm to our already fragile health care system.  Would that have ultimately wrought more societal wreckage that incubating a generation of mental health decline among young people by isolating them and failing to educate them?  Most people are pretty confident that they know the answer either way, but I'm not one of them.

And that brings us to the vaccine, which predictably became just as controversial as every other part of the pandemic if not necessarily for the reason I anticipated.  The epidemiology community sure made the public believe that, in a matter of months, a miracle cure had become available that would abruptly generate "herd immunity" and end the pandemic.  I recall visiting my doctor in November 2020 and being assured that "by next year at this time the pandemic will be over".  As it turned out, there was no such thing as a miracle cure or herd immunity.  I suspect epidemiologists knew that when they were pleading with us to get vaccinated, and it became obvious to the rest of us just a few months later when viral spread began to once again surge.  Were we bamboozled?  Yes.  Was it worth it for us to be bamboozled?  Probably.

By convincing hundreds of millions of people that unrestrained freedom and a complete return to normalcy awaited for those willing to spend 30 seconds getting stuck by a needle full of miracle medicine, they were able to reduce incidence of fatalities and hospitalization and help contain a pandemic that at any point could have mutated into something deadlier.  Indeed, the highly virulent omicron virus that took hold in the fall of 2021 could conceivably have been devastating if not for two-thirds of Americans getting vaccinated and reducing the impact of their infections.

Still, it wasn't supposed to work that way.  The vaccine was supposed to be a fire extinguisher on COVID, rendering the vaccinated individual incapable of catching the virus or transmitting it to others.  Sure, we might need to get a booster every year, but we walked out of those vaccine appointments feeling like Superman, sneering at the fools and rubes that refused to get the vaccine and blaming them prolonging the pandemic.  Perhaps we deserved to be humbled, and we certainly were by July 2001 when the same epidemiologists ensuring us the vaccine ended our problems dramatically revised their assessment and informed us we were no less likely to receive and transmit the virus than we were six months earlier.

Once again, a steep price will be paid for the scientific community having misled us on the efficacy of the vaccine, and it will manifest itself for a generation and in seemingly infinite ways, including but not limited to vastly diminished incidence of traditional childhood vaccinations and the potential health emergency waiting when those medieval diseases return.  But putting myself in the shoes of the epidemiologists at the time, I ask myself if I'd have done anything differently given the circumstances, and it's doubtful that I would.  They can only deal with one crisis at a time rather than try to predict what the downstream effects of the hypothetical next health emergency will be, and in the winter of 2000-2001, there was no greater emergency than COVID risk reduction.  Even a vaccine with only modest efficacy was monumental in reducing risk, and managing the virus's mutation and eventual decline was far less perilous with so many Americans having that first layer of protection.  With luck, the scientific community will have time to rebuild public trust before the next inevitable pandemic rears its head.  It's a gamble, but probably one worth taking.

So is there anything we definitively learned from our COVID response?  The only one entirely obvious is the one that should have been obvious all along.....don't put infected patients into nursing homes.  Even that's probably more complicated than speculating outsiders would like to admit.  At the dawn of the pandemic, there probably weren't any credible alternatives to house the patients while still giving them access to the necessary care.  With that in mind, we should definitely vastly increase the square footage of overflow emergency care for patients in the event of future health crises.  

Beyond that, don't defer to political correctness so easily.  For more than a year, the scientific community clung to a far-fetched storyline of this global pandemic originating because someone ate a bat sold at a wet market.  More than a year was wasted breathlessly defending this narrative and shooting down more credible alternatives, including the most obvious one:  that the virus originated at a virology lab right there in Wuhan, China.  Furthermore, don't tell us that viral spread is no big deal if you're protesting on behalf of racial justice and expect to ever taken seriously on anything again.

Ultimately though, no two viruses in history are alike, so those who insist they've cracked the code and have the whole virus response protocol figured out for next time are comically naive.  The next virus that triggers a pandemic will undoubtedly behave much differently than this one.  Expect an abundance of caution to be taken when the time comes just as it was in March 2020.  If it isn't, an all-out plague could be triggered if the demographics impacted by the next virus are different than those impacted by the last one.  

I really hope to never endure another pandemic footing again in my lifetime.  History indicated that pandemics typically bring out the worst in people just as wartime does, and even the relatively mild one we muddled through certainly proved that to be the case.  But whether the next one comes in one year, 10 years, or 100 years, I suspect the only consistency to be that the risk potential will be infinitely higher if the scientists are not listened to than if they are.  Especially if the next pandemic happens sooner rather than later, before COVID memories are fully memory-holed, people will be rightfully skeptical of some of the conclusions reached by the "experts", but they're more likely than not going to be sorry if they don't take those conclusions seriously and respond accordingly.



Monday, February 26, 2024

DEI/CRT vs. MAGA: The Acronym Civil War

Donald Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr famously stood up to him after the 2020 election when the former President was proclaiming widespread voting fraud, telling him to his face that what he was saying was "BS".  Barr went on to write a book a year later documenting his highly critical response to the final weeks of Trump's Presidency leading up to January 6th, and was lauded by his former political critics as a profile in courage for drawing a line in the sand in indulging Trump's threat to democracy.  Nonetheless, when pressed on if he'd vote for Trump again if he was the Republican nominee in 2024, Barr said that he would.  As unfit as he believed Trump to be for the office, Barr insisted that he believes that "the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party".

Shortly after this astonishing statement, Bill Maher interviewed Barr and asked him what could possibly be more troubling about the "progressive agenda" than the guy who tried to usurp the results of a democratically held election.  Barr's response:  "What happens in our country on a daily basis makes the McCarthy era look like child's play".  Barr submitted that the threat to democracy is not limited exclusively to the running of elections, and that everything else is downstream from public discourse that's under attack by the gatekeepers of the modern left, who are of course aligned with the Democratic Party.

As it applies to this year's Presidential election, I'm curious how many voters out there resemble former Attorney General Barr.  We're generally conditioned to believe that there are only two kinds of voters in America:  those who adore Donald Trump and would lay down their lives for him, and those who despise him to their core.  But what about people like Barr who concede that Donald Trump is temperamentally dangerous and definitively ill-suited for the office of the Presidency, but will still hold their nose and vote for him because they see an even bigger threat to American ideals coming from Trump's alternative?  This gets at something deeper than the usual caricature of a Trump skeptic who still votes for him--that of a selfish miser who just wants to see his taxes stay low--and the number of people who fit this profile will probably determine the 2024 election outcome.

Whoever wins in November, it'll almost certainly be a game of inches amidst an electorate that is simultaneously evenly divided yet in a perpetual state of rapid realignment.  And while a divided and/or realigning electorate is nothing new, the stakes seem much more existential today based on the breadth of the culture war that Bill Barr spelled out, and whether one agrees or disagrees with Barr's conclusion, it's hard not to recognize the diametrically opposed end zones on the playing field.

Over the course of the 2010s, the energy on the left became increasingly directed toward cleansing historical injustices.  This manifested itself in a number of ways that became tangible by the time the 2016 election came around, but after Donald Trump became President, social justice advocates and their cynical sometimes-allies in the corporate boardroom doubled down and then doubled down again on their expansion-pack list of cultural grievances, and on excoriating those who disagreed with them as bigots.  It's hard to say completely whether the original election of Donald Trump was a backlash to the early stages of the "woke revolution", but it's very hard to deny that voters who've cast ballots for Republicans since then have done so mostly because they share Bill Barr's perception of a political establishment determined to use whatever force may be necessary to either silence their critics or coerce them into fealty and conformity.

And unfortunately, I can't dismiss or shrug off their concerns.  Foot soldiers of the left have pushed things ridiculously far in the last decade, bulldozing into effect codified policies of intolerance masquerading as tolerance in nearly every public space and bestowing fear of ruinous reprisal for those who challenge them or who have ever made mistakes in the past.  Working-class Americans, predictably, began to see the left as a direct and menacing threat to their livelihood, and with a little help from conservative media and far too many trigger-happy elected officials with D's next to their name, connected the dots of what they'd long seen as the party of the working person to the party that constantly lectures them about their white privilege and wouldn't hesitate to render them unemployable if they wore blackface to a Halloween party in 1984 or if they'd slapped a woman's ass in a bar in 1984.

As "cancel culture" became a meme during Trump's first term, the "MAGA" logo on their red hats took on a somewhat evolved meaning.  If it had primarily represented rebuilding the lost manufacturing base and cracking down on illegal border entry from Latin countries in 2016, by 2020 and beyond "MAGA" has became more of a primal scream by a large and mostly downscale demographic of Americans who have calculated, and not incorrectly, that their liberty and the pursuit of happiness is being sacrificed on the altar of reparation because of the sins of their fathers.  And as it turns out, blood guilt is not  particularly saleable as a political platform to millions of voters who want elected officials to empathize with their concerns rather than foment a culture even more strife with risk predicated on events that occurred before they were born.  The prospect of passing along this culture of blood guilt shaming to their children and grandchildren only further raises the stakes in the eyes of those who feel they're playing defense in a war waged against them.

Not only has this dynamic helped make these voters vulnerable to the festering grievance agenda of an autocratic madman, it's made them sympathetic to his proclamations of state persecution at the hands of the very people they see as having silenced themselves.  Add in the echo chamber of algorithmically selected modern media constantly reinforcing a single toxic narrative with little to no counterpoint and you get the equivalent of a rebel army willing to enter the U.S. Capitol through force to exact vengeance on those they believe to be responsible for their vanishing autonomy over their own lives.  The civil war has become so rigid that millions of people on the MAGA side have waged a boycott over Bud Light beer based on a promotional campaign that they thought was a hat tip to wearers of the opposing cultural jersey, driving Bud Light's sales down by nearly 30%.  A fever that burns this hot is unlikely to cool anytime soon, and raises the frightening question of what lengths they would go to on behalf of torching the enemy's base camp to the ground in this de facto wartime footing.

I'm in no way defending the scores of millions of Americans who remain members of the MAGA fraternity, but it doesn't exactly take a degree in psychology to understand that a backlash this ferocious was inevitable.  And the more too-cute-by-half rejoinders about "critical race theory not being taught in public schools" that contradict either their lived experiences or the examples they continually see on their algorithmically derived media sources, the deeper they will dig their heels in for a cold civil war that, ironically, is in large part being driven by a refusal to let go of the fallout from the official civil war a century and a half ago.

And so it will march on into this November's election and beyond.....a political left that fancies itself as forward-looking but refuses to quit looking back when it comes to deducing the source of inequity....and a political right that wants to go back to an idealized America they once knew and doesn't want to be held accountable for the past that they wish to revere without context.  

Regardless of the 2024 election outcome, who will win this civil war?  It's hard to say for sure because the contours of the culture war constantly evolve in directions that few see coming, but if educational attainment continues to be the primary fault line, then the left is likely in big trouble, not just because there are more people without college degrees than with college degrees, but because the price tag of college degrees has become so inflated that today's generation of young people are eschewing college attendance as less integral to their future by rather astonishing double-digit margins compared to a generation ago.  And perhaps in the biggest irony of all, the primary reason behind the inflation of college degrees that's driving so many young people away from higher education is the expense related to hiring the ever-rising slate of administrators needed to enact and enforce the very undermining of discourse that's driving the acronym civil war in the first place.

Saturday, January 20, 2024

First Look At The 2024 Senate Race Landscape

This November, the Class I Senate seats are up for re-election.  I'll admit that a wave of nostalgia crashes upon my brain when I think of this Senate class, which has produced so many exciting election memories for me in previous cycles.  The low point from a Democratic perspective was 1994, when the GOP scored their big national landslide and consolidated support in this Senate class.  But the Democratic comeback ensued with a handful of gains in 2000, which was of course the most influential election of my lifetime.  The tide kept rising with the Democratic midterm landslide of 2006, my favorite midterm cycle of all-time, and against all odds, kept rising still in 2012 when Democrats won 25 races and Republicans only won 8.  Little did I know that would be the last genuinely fun election of my life.

With the Democrats so overexposed in Senate class I, it was obvious they were living on borrowed time, and every indication was that 2018 would be their comeuppance.  Certainly if Hillary Clinton had won the White House two years earlier, the Democrats could well have taken on a double-digit loss of seats in 2018, but of course Hillary didn't win the White House in 2016 and Democrats still had a pretty decent election night in 2018.  But heading into election night 2018, Democrats were expected to have a better night, with incumbent defeats in Missouri, Indiana, and Florida where they were thought to be even money or to have a narrow advantage.  Worse yet, even in victory the Democrats underperformed expectations in Ohio, Montana, and West Virginia, making it clear the Trump realignment of two years earlier was real.

The Democrats are still highly exposed in the 2024 Senate class, with Democrats defending 23 seats and Republicans defending 11.  Favorable electoral conditions have propped Democrats up for four consecutive cycles in Senate class I, but few analysts are going into this year expecting November 2024 to be anywhere near as good of a Democratic environment as 2006, 2012, 2018, or even 2000.  If the political environment keep worsening, the Senate landscape is bad enough that Democrats could be truly wiped out.  And even if the political environment is no worse for Democrats than it was in 2020, the last time Biden and Trump ran against each other, it's still almost unthinkable that the Democrats will be able to hold their 51-49 Senate advantage.  Let's do a deep dive...

I'll start with the Democratic-held seats I suspect are almost certain to stay in Democratic hands...

California (Open--Feinstein/Butler)

Connecticut (Murphy)

Hawaii (Hirono)

Maryland (Open--Cardin)

Massachusetts (Warren)

Minnesota (Klobuchar)

New York (Gillibrand)

Rhode Island (Whitehouse)

Vermont (Sanders)

Virginia (Kaine)

Washington (Cantwell)

 

And the seats where I think Republicans will have a safe hold....

Mississippi (Wicker)

Missouri (Hawley)

Nebraska (Fischer)

Nebraska Special (Ricketts)

North Dakota (Cramer)

Tennessee (Blackburn)

Utah (Open--Romney)

West Virginia (Open--Manchin)

Wyoming (Barrasso)

 

Obviously in one instance, a seat I'm identifying as "Safe Republican" is currently Democratic held.  With Joe Manchin retiring, there's zero chance of another Democrat prevailing in West Virginia.  Even if Manchin had decided to run for another term, I'd have likely rated this race as "Safe R".  So we're already at R +1 even before we get to any races that are even on the periphery of the Senate battleground.  Speaking of the battleground.....

Arizona--We start out with the most complicated race in the country.  Conservative Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who flipped this Grand Canyon State seat from red to blue in 2018, has spent her first Senate term voting a lot like someone who's still on the red team, so much so that she became an independent last year and is running for re-election as an independent in 2024.  Running to her left as a Democrat is Congressman Ruben Gallego while firebrand conservative and 2022 gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake is the likely Republican nominee.  At this point, Sinema doesn't have much of a natural constituency and conventional wisdom is that she's poised to come in a distant third running against the two major party candidates, but I'm not so sure.  While Arizona has undeniably shifted toward the Democrats in the Trump era, there's a lot of country club Republicans in that Democratic coalition and an outsized share of them could very well opt for Sinema over Gallego, who's a pretty decent and pragmatic candidate but still probably to the left of where most Arizonans are.  But even if Sinema gets as little as 10% of the vote that includes a fair number of moderate Republicans, the likeliest outcome of this three-way race certainly seems to be Lake prevailing.  She managed 49.6% of the vote in her losing bid for Arizona Governor in 2022, meaning that she could lose as little as 3% of that support to Sinema and still come out on top amongst a divided opposition.  Now it's certainly possible that, seeing no path to victory, Sinema decides to simply retire and make this a two-candidate race, but even in that scenario, I'd still give the advantage to the odious Lake given the increasingly poor national environment and how inept the Democrats have been on the border in a state that borders Mexico.   (GOP +2)

Delaware--Biden's home state is only barely in the 2024 battleground because it's an open seat, vacated by long-time Democratic moderate Tom Carper.  You just never know what to expect in open seats, but it would take quite a political earthquake to prevent Democratic representative Lisa Blunt Rochester from getting a promotion to the Senate against seemingly token GOP opposition in a state that hasn't voted for a Republican statewide in a quarter-century.

Florida--If Delaware is barely in the 2024 battleground for the Republicans, the increasingly red Sunshine State is barely in the battleground for the Democrats.  In virtually every sense, freshman incumbent Rick Scott is a horrible candidate, proposing Social Security abolition in a state full of seniors, but that hasn't stopped him from ekeing out the slimmest of victories both as a gubernatorial and Senate candidate as his state shifts more conservative.  The already considerable pipeline of conservative retirees to Florida escalated still further during the pandemic, and every indication is that Florida is now irredeemably MAGA. Former Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, voted out after a single term in 2020, is the best the Democrats can do.  She might help to stop the bleeding a bit with the Florida Hispanic vote, but considering the heavy hitters that Scott has laid waste to in the past, it's hard to imagine he won't chew up and spit out Mucarsel-Powell by double digits this year.

Indiana--Another barely qualifier for the battleground.  Freshman Senator Mike Braun is already calling it quits, choosing to run for Governor of the Hoosier State instead of a second Senate term.  His heir apparent seems likely to be Republican Congressman Jim Banks and it's hard to imagine that anybody from the weak field of Democrats currently declared becoming competitive, especially with Indiana having returned to rock-ribbed Republicanism after a flirtation with the Democrats a decade ago.  Still, the Democrats have enough solid names in their potential candidate log to conceivably make this race moderately competitive should one of them choose to run.  It's very unlikely though.

Maine--Two-term incumbent Angus King is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and seems likely to get a third term as he remains popular with the independent voters who decide elections.  Still, King will be 80 years old, will have both Democrat and Republican challengers, and parts of Maine are realigning to the GOP quickly.  I'm not yet to the point where I'm ready to take this race out of the potential battleground.

Michigan--Four-term Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow is retiring this year, leaving an open seat in a Midwestern battleground state that's become much more politically unpredictable in recent cycles, particularly when Donald Trump is on the ballot.  Tellingly, Stabenow badly underperformed expectations herself in the strongly Democratic 2018 cycle, winning by only 6 points.  This year, it's a bipartisan free-for-all to fill her seat with a crowded field of candidates, and at least on the Republican side, no clear frontrunner.  The Democrats' likeliest candidate is Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin from the Detroit suburbs, who's smarter than most and has outperformed the fundamentals in her district in previous runs.  Still, Biden's approval rating is cratering worse in Michigan than elsewhere in the country, partly because the state's Palestinian population is furious with Biden over his support for Israel in the latest Middle Eastern rumble.  Slotkin faces a lot of headwinds this cycle, and given that Democrats barely hung onto Gary Peters' seat with Peters as an incumbent in 2020 with much more favorable election fundamentals, I'm not that optimistic about Slotkin's chances.  Obviously, the candidate the Republicans select as her challenger will matter considerably.  The conventional wisdom is that its unlikely that moderate GOP Congressman Peter Meijer can prevail in a Republican primary, but given how crowded the Republican field is, it's not entirely out of the question. If Meijer is the GOP nominee, Slotkin is finished.  Even if he isn't, I like the prospect of "Generic R" better than Slotkin's in the current environment.  To be continued on this one.  (GOP +3)

Montana--For three consecutive cycles, populist Democratic Senator Jon Tester has kept finding impressive ways to pull out narrow victories in the Treasure State.  Of course, he's always done so in election cycles where Democrats had a generic advantage. Tester's streak of running with the wind at his back is likely to end in 2024, and with it, almost certainly his political career.  Trump is poised to win Montana by double digits.  Before the Trump realignment, it was possible for a strong Senate candidate in either party to run more than 10 points ahead of the top of the ticket, particularly in a small state like Montana.  Those days are probably over, and I'm bit surprised Tester even chose to run again and risk finding out for sure.  I suspect Tester not only loses, but loses by high single digits.  This is true whether his GOP challenger ends up being former Navy SEAL and Captain America Tim Sheehy or Tester's 2018 challenger, Congressman Matt Rosendale.  (GOP +4)

Nevada--Freshman Democrat Jacky Rosen is running for a second term in a state that's increasingly on the knife's edge for her party.  Democrats have been on a long winning streak in the Silver State, but their advantage is no longer going in a straight line as the party has been hemorrhaging support among Hispanics and the white working class in the Vegas area for the last couple of cycles and Democratic margins of victory have been getting smaller and smaller.  There's a large field of Republicans running to take on Rosen, none of whom look particularly intimidating in the abstract, but if Trump is able to blow up the Democratic advantage with working-class Hispanics this cycle as I suspect he is, there's a very good chance he'll provide coattails for whoever the GOP nominee is.  There's still not nearly enough information for this race to make a confident call, but right now I'd rather be Rosen's GOP challenger than I would Rosen.  (GOP +5)

New Jersey--The only reason the Garden State finds its way onto the Senate battleground list is the same reason that the Garden State ever finds its way onto the Senate battleground, and that's three-term Democratic incumbent and career criminal Bob Menendez who I suspect finally started a fire he won't be able to put out with his latest criminal enterprise.  Several Democratic candidates are running for his seat, the strongest of them being Congressman Andy Kim and Tammy Murphy, the well-heeled wife of current Governor Tammy Murphy.  Considering Republicans haven't been able to pull out any wins in Jersey even against Menendez following his previous criminal trials, they have a weak bench and not too many big names in the field of challengers.  While I expect Trump will make inroads among ethnic working-class voters in New Jersey, and have coattails downballot, it's very hard to imagine it would be enough for Republicans to win this Senate race...unless of course they somehow find themselves running against Menendez again.  The Democrats should hold this one, and if they don't, their party is in unprecedentedly catastrophic trouble.

New Mexico--Two-term Democratic incumbent Martin Heinrich is a heavy favorite to win a third term in the Land of Enchantment.  He has solid approval ratings and none of this GOP challengers look too intimidating. Still, his party's grip on the state hasn't quite solidified to the point that I think he's entirely out of danger in the event of a wave, particularly given that it's a border state with a large population of Hispanics whose partisan loyalty seems increasingly up for grabs.  It'd be an earthquake if Heinrich lost, but I don't think he will.

Ohio--Even when Democrats won more elections than they lost in the Midwest, the Buckeye State was their weakest link, more Republican than the country even in its bluest cycles.  The Trump realignment has all but taken Ohio off the board for Democrats, and the last-standing emissary of the state's bipartisan past faces voters in November.  Populist Democrat Sherrod Brown is running for a fourth term, and even though he's built his own brand in Ohio over several decades, it's hard to imagine a scenario where he prevails against any of his potential Republican challengers, lightweights as they seem on paper.  Any Brown victory would require him to run a bare minimum of seven points ahead of Trump, and I just don't think that's possible in a state the size of Ohio in 2024.  Whichever of Brown's GOP challengers prevails in the primary is likely to become the state's next Senator, and depressingly, will probably beat Brown decisively.  (GOP +6)

Pennsylvania--Another incumbent Senator from the class of 2006 who's built his own brand is three-term incumbent Democrat Bob Casey, who's running for a fourth term.  His likely GOP challenger is rich guy David McCormick, who was narrowly edged out by Mehmet Oz as the 2022 Senate nominee, which could very well have cost Republicans that seat.  McCormick doesn't seem like the best demographic fit for today's Republican Party but you can be sure he'll get a turnout boost with Trump at the top of the ticket.  It's hard to imagine a scenario where McCormick doesn't give Casey the race of his career.  At least for now, I think Casey still pulls it out given how narrow the Republican path to victory is in Pennsylvania but I'm betting on a 2-point race.

Texas--After Republican Ted Cruz only prevailed by 2 points in 2018, it's clear he's weaker than the average Republican in a state with a demographic profile trending favorably to Democrats, albeit slowly.  Cruz will have a strong challenger this year (at least on paper) from three-term Congressman Collin Allred from suburban Dallas, a perfect avatar for the changing political profile of Texas.  Still, I don't think is gonna be Allred's year.  I suspect that even the odious Cruz will benefit from the chaos on the southern border that has negatively impacted Texas more than any other state.  Any ongoing realignment in upscale suburbs will be more than offset by a consolidation of GOP support in the Rio Grande Valley, where I suspect across the board double-digit GOP gains, including in population centers like El Paso, Laredo, and McAllen.  Ultimately, I suspect Cruz wins more decisively than he did in 2018.

Wisconsin--As is always the case at the outset of any election cycle, the Badger State stands out as one of the biggest wild cards.  Two-term Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin is seeking her third term, and she must be intimidating enough to scare off top-tier challengers as declared GOP candidates are the very definition of weak sauce.  In a competitive cycle with Trump at the top of the ballot, it's likely that even the weakest possible Republican challenger will get within 5 points of Baldwin, but at least for now it seems as though she has a decided advantage in pulling out a win.


More than 10 months before the general election, I have the Republicans gaining six Senate seats, which would give them at a 55-45 majority.  That's larger than what most election analysts currently imagine, but it doesn't seem the least bit bullish based on trends in the national environment.  Given that the incumbent Democratic President is quickly approaching re-election metrics as terrible as Jimmy Carter in 1980, it's easy to imagine a genuine wave election for the GOP where they sweep all of the battleground races and even some that weren't on the board just as was the case 44 years ago.  

But even if we entertain the notion of a historic Biden comeback that helps Democrats out in these Senate races, maintaining Senate control requires Democrats to sweep EVERY competitive race.  That includes Ohio and Montana, where Democrats would need to outrun Biden by at least a half dozen points to eke out a win.  I guess a surprise win in Texas would give them one extra seat to work with, but that's a long shot.  And of course, even if Democrats got the inside flush in the Senate races, a Biden win would still be required for the Vice President to be a tie-breaking vote. The bottom line is that I can much more easily envision a 57-43 Republican Senate at this time in 2025 than I can a 50-50 + Democratic Vice President Senate.  Suffice it to say that if it plays out this way, my nostalgia for the Class I Senate races will be a bit tarnished.


Saturday, December 30, 2023

I'm Skeptical of the "Deal" That Could Save Biden's Presidency

As 2023 winds down, Joe Biden is heading into the year that voters will formally judge his Presidency, and it's no secret that things are not looking good for him at all.  There are a lot of issues working against him, but the most intractable issue is that he just can't seem to control the influx of migration through (mostly) the southern border.  Last summer, border crossings had declined and it looked as though Biden's hawkish remedies from earlier in the year were producing favorable results, but as soon as the heat of summer waned, the surge of migrants resumed on pace with the previous year and has shown no signs of letting up.  Given the national security implications of 10,000 loosely monitored border crossings per day, it's a catastrophic problem, and the Biden administration realizes it.

With that in mind, the administration was wise to try to coax Congressional Republicans into going along with a massive spending deal that commingles immigration reform with financial aid to Ukraine and Israel.  It's clever politics given that loose bipartisan majorities exist for all three initiatives, but factions of both parties are stridently against any realistic solution.  Delusional progressives in the Democratic caucus continue to insist the nation's asylum process needs no reform at all.  The growing MAGA wing of the GOP loves Vladimir Putin as much as their movement's leader does and wants to see Ukraine defeated by the Russians.  And support for Israel seemed poised to collapse very quickly based on public opinion polls, which the politicians will soon catch up with.  

That's a bit of a strawman evaluation of the state of affairs, but it's also not that much of an exaggeration of where we stand.  Any kind of bipartisan deal would involve the shrinking "establishment wings" of both parties, who want to fix the border and provide continued military aid to allies Ukraine and Israel, to incur the wrath of their respective parties' bases who provide both the funding and the foot soldiers to win elections.  It's a tall order....and one I have a hard time seeing happening in an election year no matter how serious the consequences for the country.

To be sure, Mitch McConnell and his wing of the Republican Party would be thrilled with this deal in the abstract, but it's almost impossible to imagine anybody in the GOP willing to give Biden a win of this magnitude.  Twenty-eight years ago, Newt Gingrich's Congress gave Bill Clinton a big policy win on welfare reform just before the 1996 election, and Clinton was decisively re-elected months later because it blunted their message for "needing a change".  Particularly with Trump poised to be the GOP emissary again, he will pressure Republican lawmakers to resist any kind of deal that diminishes his hand on running against Biden over the border, and they can be expected to respond in effective unanimity with his demands.  Republican lawmakers will deduce that if there's nothing in the deal that will benefit Trump, there's nothing in it that will benefit the rest of them sharing the ticket with him in November.  Chaos on the border serves their short-term and long-term political purpose, and frankly a major terrorist attack wrought by someone who crossed the porous border would only strengthen their political hand.

It speaks volumes about how broken our two-party system is, and reinforces my suspicion that it's on the verge of collapse, with an authoritarian reconfiguration of the country engineered by Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller now looking like an inevitable deus ex machina ending.  That's not to say there aren't legitimate policy differences that could derail funding for the next wave of forever wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, or even a more hawkish immigration policy for that matter.  But when McConnell and dozens of other establishment Republicans in Congress agree with Biden on each of the three major policy items up for a vote in this deal yet are still poised to unanimously turn the deal down based on partisan trench warfare, then where do we go from here?  The American experiment is dead right?  Trump's promised "day one dictatorship" isn't gonna be the kind of deterrent it would have been at a time when our political system was semi-functional.

There's plenty of blame to go around on how we got here and no obvious turning points where this road could have been definitively avoided, but circling back to the issue that Biden recognizes as his biggest political problem, it's fair to point out that Democrats had a preview of what was coming nearly a generation earlier based on electoral realignment in Europe connected to immigration.  Marine Le Pen may not have ever won an election in France, but others who followed her template have been winning elections for some time, most famously in Hungary but, even in the past year, in lefty bastions such as Italy, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

Twenty years before Donald Trump changed American politics forever, conservatives in Europe were changing their message to voters, shifting away from Margaret Thatcher-style plutocracy and toward populism.  Recognizing that the working-class of any society is inherently conservative because they correctly fear they have the most to lose if "change" has any kind of negative consequence at all, European conservatives altered their message toward the working-class to exploit that fear, raising alarms about immigration as the biggest threat to their status quo.  Without too much heavy lifting, European conservatives co-opted their nations' working class as a consequence, and were scoring some surprise wins in elections, even as the conservative party of the United States kept running candidates like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney who continued in the vein of Margaret Thatcher.  It was kind of strange that virtually nobody in the establishment wings of either party recognized the potential for the American electorate to be realigned the same way conservative populists realigned so many electorates in Europe.

Then along came Donald Trump.  Just as was the case in Europe, it was remarkable how easily the Democrats' base was snatched away right under their noses by the guy promising to "build a wall" to stop illegal immigration, even when the guy who did the realigning was quite obviously one of the worst human beings to ever run for higher office.  The working class responded to Trump just as the working-class responded to Trumpian figures that preceded him in Europe.  If not for the hardened racial fault lines that have long complicated American politics, the shift to Trump would have likely been even more comprehensive, and long-term, I suspect class schisms will transcend race to a greater degree than they do now.

And yet, even after the odious Trump proved how easily the electorate was moved by a hawkish message on immigration, the left doubled down and then tripled down in the opposite direction.  From "abolishing ICE" to "decriminalizing border crossings", the progressive consensus on illegal immigration kept getting more cartoonish and more dissonant from where voters were.  And by 2019, there was no longer any daylight between open borders activists and the Democratic Party, with a stage full of Democratic Presidential aspirants raising their hands in support of decriminalizing border crossings.  

There's a semantic debate whether Biden actually "intended to raise his hand or not" on that stage, but it's beside the point.  Biden ran against Trump's immigration hawkishness throughout the 2020 campaign and then proceeded to reverse them by executive order as one of his first orders of business as President.  Biden owned everything that happened after that politically, and what has happened was a predictable escalation of asylum abuse, followed by desperate efforts by Biden to clean up the mess, all of which served the purpose of validating Trump's immigration hawkishness to a majority of voters and moving the terms of the debate in Trump's direction heading into 2024.

The debate over illegal immigration is over, and Donald Trump has won it.  Biden has already reversed some of his 2021 policies in response to the surge of asylum-seekers, and the hypothetical "deal" Biden is trying to finesse amounts to a full concession.  Meanwhile, Trump's rhetoric on the issue in the 2024 campaign is even more hostile and visceral than it was in 2016 and 2020, also mirroring the trajectory of Europe's conservative parties.

It may be that no efforts to stop this mass migration of impoverished people from developing nations to wealthy nations, on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, have any chance of working in the modern connected world.  And it may well be that democracy as we know it will end up on the cutting room floor of Western society in a fruitless attempt to stop a flow of humanity that cannot be stopped by waves of increasingly hawkish political leaders responding to electorates that refuse to accept that flow of humanity arriving at their borders.  Nonetheless, every indication is that voters in the United States and Europe will continue to insist that they try.  After centuries of our species equating the crossing of borders with pending annihilation, it's too ingrained in our evolutionary experience to simply accept millions of people crossing the border every year.

It's possible that, because of other unprecedented and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Trump will fail to get elected to another term as President in November 2024, but even if he doesn't, expect the Republicans who follow in his footsteps and run on an immigration message just as strident.  Also expect the next guy to argue in defense of "being a dictator on day one" if necessary to restore an orderly border.  And expect a critical mass of voters to, at some point, decide to let them.  Republicans recognize that slowing the tide of outsiders from entering our shores without permission is poised to be the most pervasive political issue of the decades to come.  Democrats somehow failed to recognize that until very recently.  With that in mind, it makes no political sense for Republicans to yield this incredible leverage by making any kind of deal with Biden.  They know they're on the winning side of this issue, and from Mitt Romney to Marjorie Taylor Greene, it's not in their political interest to ever let voters forget that.


Friday, November 10, 2023

Should We Believe Polls or Special Election Results?

Earlier this week, Democrats had above-average showings in a number of states with partisan races on the ballot.  This was true in red states and blue states alike, with Democrats taking over the Virginia state House, holding both houses of the New Jersey legislature, winning the Kentucky gubernatorial race, and even in defeat, putting up their best showing in Mississippi since the 1990s.  This is the latest in a string of victories for the Democrats, who outperformed expectations in the 2022 midterms and have prevailed in the vast majority of special elections since then.  The results are in stark contrast to months' worth of worsening Presidential poll numbers heading into 2024.  Does it come down to as binary of a schism of "a Democratic Party problem versus a Biden problem"?  Or is there more going on here?

First of all, I should refrain from optimism in my electoral predictions as every time I deviate from my inherently skeptical nature, I get burned.  Back in June, the stars were lining up for Biden and I suggested he could be on track for a convincing re-election victory if the fundamentals continued improving.  Since then, even with above-average fundamentals, Biden's numbers have only gotten worse, and the unrest in the Middle East has only further complicated his efforts to rebuild his barely sufficient 2020 coalition.  But based on how well Democrats have been doing in the last two years, is it reasonable to speculate that the polls aren't capturing the size of Biden's pending coalition?

It may be.  Ever since the Dobbs decision, Democrats have exploited the abortion issue to impressive electoral effect, turning contest after contest into a referendum on legal abortion.  There's no reason to doubt that Democrats will run that same playbook as much as is possible in 2024, and they'll almost certainly win some votes that Biden wouldn't have otherwise won because of it. 

Even setting abortion aside, there's some indication that the polling models have overcorrected from their problems in 2016 and 2020, and may now be oversampling Republicans instead of Democrats.  The most prominent, but far from the only, example is Wisconsin.  After two cycles of horrendous polling in the Badger State that badly underestimated Trump support, the opposite happened in 2022 with Democratic Governor Tony Evers outperforming the polls and Republican Senator Ron Johnson barely squeaking by despite polls showing him winning by a more decisive margin.  Even this week in Kentucky and Mississippi, which are also hard states to poll and frequently undersample conservatives, the Democratic gubernatorial candidates outperformed the most recent polls.

But all of these recent contests where Democrats have done better than expected have one thing in common.....Donald Trump was not on the ballot.  Despite the long-held conventional wisdom of how much of an anchor Trump is on the Republican Party, every available example has shown us the opposite result.  Trump blew up the polling models in 2016, finding votes nobody expected in key states that got him 306 electoral votes.  Assurances that he could never build upon that voter base fell flat four years later when he found an astonishing 10 million more votes than he did in 2016, falling just short of a second term only because the Democrats crushed turnout records to an even more unprecedented level.

There's no reason to believe Trump isn't capable of bringing out this stealth voter base once again in 2024, provided that he's the nominee.  He has an unmatched ability to bring out low-propensity populist voters that nobody else has proven capable of getting to the polls, particularly now that the MAGA revolution is realigning the electorate along educational lines and bringing increasing numbers of noncollege voters of color into the GOP orbit.  With that in mind, I'd be more comfortable with the notion of continued Democratic turnout overperformance if Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis was the Republican nominee, as that would likely come with a more predictable electorate.  An election where Donald Trump is on the ballot is simply harder to know what the electorate will look like.  

And despite the consensus opinion that Trump is the weakest possible nominee for the Republicans, I submit that more votes would be cast for Trump than any other Republican in the field.  The wild card, of course, is that Trump would likely bring out more voters to cast ballots against him than any other candidate in the field as well.  That puts Trump in the odd position of simultaneously being the GOP's best possible 2024 nominee and its worst, probably rendering BOTH the polls and the Democrats' election victories since 2020 as irrelevant metrics heading into next November.

Thursday, October 05, 2023

Oliver Anthony Tells Us A Lot About Our Deranged Politics

We live in genuinely intriguing times, and the frequency at which things that even a few years ago would never be seen now "go viral" and sweep the country in a matter of days in near the top of the list of what's fascinating.  This summer's most intriguing "viral" moment came from Oliver Anthony, a young country singer from the mountains of central Virginia, who posted a populist anthem online that he recorded in the holler near his hometown.  It's very obvious based on his flabbergasted response that Anthony was caught off guard that his song was heard by more than the few dozen people who followed him on social media, but notoriety nonetheless came his way after millions of people sampled his video.  

It seemed as though a star was born as right-wing media latched onto the message of Anthony's song and tried to capture it, and him, in a bottle.  To his ever-lasting credit, Anthony burst their bubble, refusing to embrace the political ideologues who attempted to co-opt him and shaming Republican Presidential candidates who claimed his message as their own.  Perhaps he simply wasn't ready for the national spotlight, but I'll take him at his word that he's politically centrist.  Either way, the core message of Oliver Anthony's hit song speaks volumes of how detached our politics have become from reality, and how easily one-time allies can turn on each other once electoral coalitions change.

The core argument of Oliver Anthony's "Rich Men North of Richmond" is that there's only one bogeyman preventing ignored rural communities from thriving and that's the federal government.  In the past, populist anthems sometimes hinted that government was a passive participant in the declining standard of living for their families and their communities, but Anthony's song isolated the federal government as a mustache-twisting evil empire bent on Middle America's destruction.  And of course, everybody associated with the MAGA movement ate it up.  After all, it's been an article of faith in downscale rural America for nearly a generation now that their glory days could be restored if only government stepped out of the way.

My primary question to Oliver Anthony and those who love his song is this:  if the "rich men north of Richmond" aren't stepping up to pay for your insulin, then who will?  This is just one high-profile example of the fundamental disconnect between government-dependent rural communities who nonetheless hate the government and want to see it crushed.  The closest we've come to a reality check came in 2018, when John McCain's downwardly projected thumb was the only thing that prevented Trump from taking away health insurance protections for Americans with preexisting conditions.  Given that that describes pretty much every adult over 30 in West Virginia, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin used the health care debate as the centerpiece of his 2018 campaign, managing an extremely unlikely reelection win in Trump's best state.  With Obamacare's fate seemingly secure at this point, the same voters who narrowly decided in favor of not forfeiting their own lifesaving health care coverage reverted back to detesting everything about the government.

Of course it's more than just health care.  Rural areas require considerable publicly funded infrastructure to be livable and will require much more infrastructural improvement to have a snowball's chance in hell of being economically competitive in a more digitized world.  And yet they're aggressively siding with politicians voting against infrastructure improvements.

To be fair, Oliver Anthony's backyard probably has more salient grounds for their grievance against the federal government than most rural regions, even if it's artificial.  Tightening federal regulations on coal production is without question hurting their economy badly, and undoubtedly plenty of people in places like Farmville, Virginia, would argue that their miner employers were better positioned to pay for their insulin and to facilitate infrastructure improvements before the federal regulations put them out of business with no replacement industry waiting on deck.  Of course that's an incomplete assessment given that the fracking boom of the late 2000s would have priced coal out of the energy marketplace even without tighter federal regulations on coal, but you'd have a hard time making that case convincingly to residents of coal mining regions left for dead.  

Furthermore, decades of irreversible environmental damage was done to the Appalachian landscape by a coal industry insufficiently regulated.  If not for the "rich men north of Richmond" ultimately imposing some limits, the region may no longer be livable even if the mines were still open.  Google Pitcher, Oklahoma, if you're looking for a good example.

So it's fair to say that shifting electoral coalitions have made for the strangest of political bedfellows, the end stage of which is epitomized by Oliver Anthony's tone-deaf lyrics.  But the response to Anthony's populist polemic has been just as telling, with the insufferable cacophony of educated elites browbeating him for being on the wrong side of the culture war.  One take that really jumped out at was from columnist Tyler Cowen of Bloomberg News.  Having followed the shifting political rhetoric since the Trump realignment, Cowen's thesis sounded familiar to me.

Says Cowen:  "Anthony lives in the distant rural town of Farmville, whose population is below 8,000 and which has a per capita income of roughly $13,000. No one should force him to leave, but if he truly wants a higher real wage I have some words of wisdom from John Mellencamp: A job in a small town “provides little opportunity.” Or, as Ray Charles put it, more imperatively: “Hit the Road, Jack.” Or, economics aside, may I ask for something a bit more positive and agentic? How about Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome”?"

Oh so just leave?  And go to where the jobs are?  Gee, why didn't they think of that!?!  So all Farmville residents have to do is abandon their families and flee for the big city?  Finding a buyer for their run-down homes in a depressed local economy and then, once in the city, dump the entire value of their old homes for a one-year lease on a shoebox apartment?  Tyler Cowen just solved rural poverty, folks!

I grew up in the Midwest during the 1980s amidst a backdrop of the farm crisis along with a manufacturing economy in widespread retraction in every sector from meatpacking to steel to auto production.  In the face of this despair, the smug consensus from the college boys was that we needed to quit whining and just leave if our communities were struggling.  Needless to say there wasn't much love for those Reagan-era college boys in the communities they were shrugging off.  But two generations later and a funny thing happened with those college boys....they changed partisan affiliation.

While I'm sure Tyler Cowen meant no ill toward Oliver Anthony's neighbors, you can nonetheless be sure that the tone-deaf assessment on their plight has been noticed...and internalized.  It sure was by me when my political identity was forming and Reagan-era flacks on the right didn't seem to care about my family, friends, and neighbors.  Fast forward to 2023 and, ever since the Trump realignment, I've noticed that it's those on the center-left who are routinely parroting Cowen's words of wisdom to the Trump-voting country bumpkins, and are ultimately hardening their disdain for them in the process.

The common denominator here is that the ideology has become tangibly flexible, secondary to the partisan tribalism.  Rural voters who championed the likes of FDR and Bobby Kennedy for recognizing the federal government's vital role in improving their quality of life now decry the "rich men north of Richmond" as their singular source of oppression, despite it being less rooted in reality than ever before.  Likewise, simplistic bromides about "moving to where the jobs are" can be counted upon from those living in communities of affluence interchangeably between the parties, as it's much easier to tell people you don't like to just go away rather than expend any intellectual energy to come up with long-term solutions.

And that's a snapshot of American politics in the 2020s, detached from all measure of common sense and conventional political gravity in every possible way.  The electoral horse race is still kind of fun, but when the political environment is this schizophrenic, it's nowhere near as fun as it used to be when people's voting habits still made some semblance of sense.


Saturday, September 09, 2023

Can Any GOP Challenger Beat Trump To The Nomination

A few months ago, I thought there was an opening for one of Trump's Republican challengers to defeat him for the party's Presidential nomination.  Even in June and July, I acknowledged that it was a long shot, requiring Trump to have a particularly vulnerable episode at the same time as a single Republican candidate had a surge of momentum, clearing the field of all other challengers and consolidating non-Trump support.  

With each passing week, that seems less possible, but I still won't discount the possibility with as frenzied of affairs as nomination fights have become in the last generation.  At this point in 2003, it seemed there was almost no chance that John Kerry would prevail for the 2004 Democratic nomination.  In September 2007, neither Barack Obama nor John McCain seemed poised to be nominated less than a year later.  And Joe Biden's fortunes rose and fell with breathtaking swings in late 2019 and early 2020.  By contrast, Donald Trump's fortunes held steady in his previous Presidential runs.  As soon as Trump laid waste to erstwhile frontrunner Jeb Bush in the summer of 2015, he never looked back and held his lead easily until the nominating in the spring of 2016.  

It's looking increasingly likely that the latter scenario will unfold instead of the former heading into the 2024 nomination fight.  After all, at least Trump's 2016 challengers put up a fight.  This year's challengers have made it clear that they won't.  Maybe as it gets closer to the time when voters head to the polls, if Trump's challengers can smell a whiff of his blood in the water, they'll test drive an effective attack against him, but I'm skeptical.  To be fair, it's hard to know what line of attack would work, especially since Trump's head-to-head polling numbers against Biden are no worse than the other Republicans in the field, giving MAGA voters little reason to trade up and giving the other candidates limited leverage to aggressively take him on.

If Trump's foes are able to draw blood, it would most likely involve litigating the Trump campaign's badly weakened financial standing.  Trump will burn through tens of millions of dollars as he faces due process for his felony indictments, and that will at some point lead to a campaign finance spiral.  It's already happening to a limited degree, but as the court cases ramp up, they will chew up an increasing proportion of his campaign's finances.  This should be a lay-up for rival campaigns to exploit, arguing that he won't be able to run an effective campaign in person because of all the time he'll be spending in courtrooms and on the ground because the big-money donors, sick of bankrolling his legal defense, will at some point refrain from donating.  In a normal campaign, this would be an easy sell, but these aren't normal times and the fever swamp of contemporary GOP politics is definitely no normal coalition.  Still, Republicans are hungry to win and if they can be convinced another candidate is more likely to win than Trump, it's not unthinkable that they could cobble together enough dissenters to keep Trump below 50% support.

But who among them has any chance to do that?  Prior to last month's Fox News debate, my money was on South Carolina Senator Tim Scott as the strongest candidate in the field.  That may still be true, but damn did Scott lay an egg in that debate.  It was another South Carolinian who genuinely impressed in the debate, and that was former Governor Nikki Haley, who skillfully positioned herself as an eloquent emissary of the center-right with the potential to clean up in the general election.  If Trump stumbles, she'd be in the catbird seat for consolidating the non-MAGA vote, but she's got a big logistical problem that I already touched upon.  Both she and Tim Scott are from South Carolina, and since it's one of the earliest states in deciding the nomination, it's not particularly likely that either will drop out before South Carolina votes.  This would position them to cannibalize each other's support and undermine their individual potential.

This is a highly inconvenient overlap for Republicans who want to win next year, as either Haley or Scott strike me as formidable foes for Biden.  The Democrats at this point require full consolidation of both African Americans and college-educated white voters to eke out the narrowest of wins, and Scott and Haley would be well-positioned to chip away at Democratic margins among both groups, with limited downside potential of losing support on the right.

How about Mike Pence?  Ron DeSantis?  Chris Christie?  Larry Elder?  Ryan Binkley?  My first instinct is that the Republicans could nominate a ham sandwich and get a bare minimum of 47% of the vote and every one of the states Trump won in 2020, positioning any of the GOP candidates to eke out 270 electoral votes.  And that's likely to happen but there's always some variables in the mix, including third-party candidates from either the center or the right who could poach some votes, and of course, in any scenario where Donald Trump is denied the nomination, he would insist the primaries were "rigged" and would send his replacement nominee's campaign over the cliff in the general election, denying them a potentially large faction of the MAGA army.

Any of these scenarios at this point seems like a long shot though.  As badly as DeSantis's star has fallen in the past few months, it wouldn't surprise me if he dropped out before the first primary as Scott Walker did when his campaign started to sag eight years ago, attempting to cut the losses to his reputation before a humiliating defeat and perhaps salvage a political future.  It's long been assumed that DeSantis would be the last challenger standing against Trump, but even if DeSantis stays in the race, it's less than obvious at this point that he would fill the role.  If not DeSantis, then who survives as Trump's final head-to-head rival?  Right now, that strikes me as the most interesting lingering mystery of the nomination fight, and whoever it is, what their strategy will be to take him on.

Ever since 1992, elections where incumbent Presidents run for re-election tend to match up very closely to the previous Presidential cycle.  Only in open-seat contests are we likely to see any kind of realignment.  Given that the last election was decided by fewer than 50,000 combined votes in three states, I'd bet against anybody getting a mandate in the general election.  Barring unpredictable third-party noise, that bodes well for Trump in having some semblance of even-money chances next year.  But it bodes equally well for any of his challengers for the nomination whose odds would be no worse and potentially much better than Trump's.  A coin-flip chance for the Presidency awaits whoever gets the Republican nomination, but unless your last name is Trump, your odds get longer by the day for getting the nomination that positions you to flip that coin.