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Shower thought: conditional on a Harris win in 2024, what are the odds that Trump runs again in 2028? I want a return to the dynamics of pre-Trump elections, where at least the candidates had the decency to act embarrassed at being shown to be corrupt, so the fewer times he gets at bat the better.
He'll have the existing huge demand for populist wrecker policies and style that most politicians can't supply, so the crowd will want him back. The crowd wants him back, so it seems like his narcissism would pull him back in, but his age might preclude it, and a loss might drive him away from Presidential elections via sour grapes.
I don't know much of his psychology, and of course there's four years of unknown unknown developments until then. What other factors can you all identify? How do we beat them all against each other to get a spread of probabilities?
There is no going back to pre-Trump, any more than there's going back to pre-FDR. The milk is spilled, the eggs are broken, the die is cast. Trump is not the driver of this sentiment, he is just the only one willing to harness the latent desires of the electorate.
If you care about corruption, Nancy Pelosi's career of insider trading is right there. What you want has nothing to do with corruption, or you'd mention the net worth of politicians on a congressional salary. You'd mention book deals that are explicitly excluded from bribery and ethics policies. What you want is something else.
I think what you want is to return to the migration consensus, because that's what I think is the only true difference between politicians and parties these days. You know this is true because of what happened in France, where, when push comes to shove, there's the remigration party and there's everybody else. This explains the Never-Trumpers and the likes of the Cheneys and Mitt Romney. This explains the hysteria over Trump, and the uniparty. Maybe I'm wrong, but I this isn't about corruption, and Trump is not particularly corrupt when compared to other politicians.
The problem for the Republicans is what does the post-Trump era look like.
I love J.D. Vance. I think he's the smartest politician we've seen for a long time and he is clued in to the real problems we face in a way that the dinosaurs in both parties are not. He is probably one of the few politicians who has read Scott.
But let's be honest. He'd get slaughtered in the general. High IQ white guys like Vance don't win minority and blue collar voters.
Now that the Republicans have gone populist, they will need populism to win. It feels overly dramatic, but I am seriously worried that unless Trump wins we will have uniparty rule for a long time.
I feel like this is something the Pumpkin-Spice class tells itself to justify not even bothering to try. Reagan, Bush II, and to a lesser degree DeSantis, all being clear counter-examples.
Maybe I'm over updating. I'm a huge DeSantis fan who legit thought that he would win the Republican nomination. He is massively popular in Florida. But he couldn't even get off the starting block.
So here's my updated theory. In the current climate, 95% of the media is enemy territory. You need some sort of guerilla strategy to get airtime. Simply having a great track record and great ideas isn't enough. Look what the media did to Vance. If he gets coverage at all in the media, it's heavily negative. Meanwhile, a midwit like Walz gets tons of positive coverage despite having a terrible record and being a phony to boot. So Republicans need to hack the media to win, which is what Trump did in 2016.
The idea that a conventional candidate like Romney or Bush Sr. could thrive in 2024 just seems anachronistic. The elites wholesale abandoned the Republican Party for the Democrats starting around 2010. Without their support, you need something special.
I don't know. I hope I'm wrong.
As i touched upon downthread, I think DeSantis' problem was that he was running as the "Trump-Lite" candidate against Trump himself, and that there was no particular reason for anyone already inclined to vote for Trump (or an otherwise Trump-ish candidate) to pick him over the genuine article.
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