Early Election 2024 Roundup

It's been an active start to the new Congressional term and thus an active start to the 2024 election campaign that runs in direct parallel in the modern era of the permanent campaign.  The first volley was the protracted battle for Speaker of the House, where Kevin McCarthy finally managed to prevail after an astonishing 15 rounds of voting.  The intransigence of the rebels in the GOP caucus and their resistance to McCarthy didn't come entirely as a surprise, but the longevity of their public rebuke over multiple days did raise some eyebrows.  I suspected they would only hold out for a couple of ballots before they fell in line to avoid a national embarrassment, but they dug in their heels for a full week and gave the newly elected GOP majority a black eye.

In one sense, the likes of Gaetz, Boebert, and Biggs back up the media narrative of a hopelessly divided GOP caucus that will struggle to get anything done as its rebels' only interest is burning the place down, and will view the fallout of their own failure to govern as a virtue rather than a vice, backing up their worldview of the futility of government.  On the other hand, I'm not counting on two years of complete chaos as the mainstream media conventional wisdom keeps insisting.  On the vast majority of matters, I expect there will be enough ideological conformity for the GOP majority to get their foot soldiers across the finish line on policy votes.  Of course time will tell if that will hold in 2023, particularly on the body's most central function of basic governance this year...raising the debt ceiling.

It was eerie timing when, only days after the epic struggle to get enough GOP votes to make Kevin McCarthy the Speaker of the House, the Treasury secretary revealed that the nation was only days away from reaching its debt ceiling and creative accounting would be required to limp along until June without defaulting.  The gauntlet has been thrown.  It's possible that the gravity of those intersecting headlines will be a wake-up call, but it's hard to imagine Gaetz and Boebert are capable of being awakened about the consequences of their choices.  And even if the Speaker of the House attempts to be the adult in the room, as John Boehner did back in 2011 when facing a similar "fiscal cliff", McCarthy will still be forced to serve as the mouthpiece of his most strident members if he has any hope of securing their votes.  

So will the dozen or so people responsible for delaying the Speaker of the House's confirmation also be responsible for sending us into a global depression by not raising the debt ceiling?  I'm not discounting the premise entirely but I'm skeptical, and I also think the Democrats' attempt to shield themselves from blame if and when the drama unfolds will be futile as they unquestionably have some blood on their hands.  Democrats held the trifecta for two months after the election and could have easily raised the debt limit before January, taking that issue off the table as a GOP negotiating weapon.  But they apparently wanted the fight just as much as Republicans, expecting that the opposition would look foolish and reckless.  This is dangerous politics and the fact that Democrats didn't do the responsible thing before McCarthy or any other Republican leader assumed power confirms the frightening degree to which the most basic functions of governance have spiraled into tribal gamesmanship.

But cynicism aside, are the Democrats right that the GOP would take all the blame in the event of a debt crisis debacle?  In the comparatively less partisan times of 2012, there's some indication that the Republicans took a hit because of the Tea Party and their fiscal cliff brinksmanship a year earlier, but that was an era when North Dakota and Missouri were still electing Democrats to the Senate.  The partisan divide has become much more calcified, meaning more voters can be expected to toe the party line no matter how bad one side's behavior may be.  Furthermore, if Biden either looks too weak to effectively lead the negotiations or fails to avoid a calamitous outcome, the incumbent President will almost certainly take a beating in public opinion.  The tactic that worked for Obama a decade ago will not necessarily be as effective next year....just as Biden's 2024 challenger is not likely to be as much of a milquetoast as Mitt Romney was.

Of course, I'm framing this argument within the context of Joe Biden running for reelection, a premise I had largely dismissed for most of the last two years but which now seems increasingly plausible.  If a competent successor to the octogenarian Biden had somehow materialized in the last 24 months, it might be more obvious to him and his party that he needs to step aside.  But the verdict seems to be nearly unanimous that Vice President Kamala Harris isn't up to the task and other alternatives floating trial balloons such as Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker, the respective governors of California and Illinois, also seem like certain losers in a national campaign.

On the other hand, the Democrats' hard pivot to glowing acceptance of Biden running for a second term comes across as delusional.  The guy didn't have the energy needed for a vigorous Presidential campaign at the comparatively youthful age of 77 back in 2020, but managed to get away with it because the isolation requirements of the COVID pandemic allowed him to literally phone it in from his basement.  He's unlikely to have that luxury next year if he runs again....at age 81!  And in the event of a Ron De Santis nomination on the Republican side, the optics would not be good for Biden getting regularly outhustled on the campaign trail by a challenger nearly half his age.

Of course, the point may be moot thanks to the recent revelation of multiple classified documents being found in Biden's house.  The President had been on a pretty decent roll of late and was seeing his approval ratings rise as a result, but if the classified documents issue proves to have any kind of legs at all, it'll be an anchor on his boomlet.  And with economists predicting a recession in 2023 regardless of what happens over the debt ceiling fight, the current popular position that Biden is running for reelection could change against him just as quickly as it changed his direction right after the midterms.

It's hard to stay ahead of these things with as quickly as the prevailing winds are changing, but it's always interesting to take a snapshot of the electoral landscape at the dawn of a new Congressional cycle just to see how wrong the conventional wisdom ends up being 20 months down the road.  History suggests that it's usually very wrong, and matters not currently on anybody's radar will be poised to dominate the debate in the not too distant future.  

It was intriguing that the 2022 midterms pretty much locked in place the electoral consensus of 2020.  At this point, I suspect analysts expect that to largely be the case again in 2024, but I'd be surprised it if does.  Particularly if Trump is denied his party's nomination--a scenario that seemed unlikely six months ago but no longer does--the Republicans will be able to push the reset button with a new national face to their party and a clean slate.  For the voters who decide elections, the Trump era will be in the rearview mirror and will very likely have a degree of separation from whatever intransigence unfolds in the House of Representatives in the next two years.  That's not to say the GOP has a definitive upper hand heading into 2024, but I'd kind of rather be them than the Democrats right now.