Winning in 2024

The Biden Administration is a disaster for the country and — more to the point for purposes of this entry — the Democratic Party. Take a look at the Real Clear Politics averages. By more than four-to-one, Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. In the Monmouth poll, admittedly the most dire of the bunch, 87% think the country is headed in the wrong direction and only 10% disagree — the worst numbers I’ve ever seen in more than 50 years of following politics. Less than 40% approve of the President’s performance while 57% disapprove. And in the three polls RCP reports after the Dobbs decision was handed down to Biden’s loudly announced consternation, his approval is worse than in the polls taken before.

The reasons Biden is doing so poorly are widely understood so I’ll reprise them only briefly: A cowardly and precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan that cost American lives; a major war in Europe our “diplomacy” failed to avert; an increasingly aggressive and dangerous China with its sights on Taiwan; inflation at a 40-year high and visiting itself on your pocketbook in ways so ubiquitous and relentless the press can’t fuzz it over; supply chain shortages in everything from semi-conductors to baby formula; race huckstering and racial antagonism getting stoked as Biden looks on (or abets); murder surging across the country to levels we haven’t seen in a generation; an illegal immigration crisis at the southern border the Administration sort of acknowledges but seems unable or unwilling to staunch; and drug overdose deaths at levels (over 100,000 last year) unseen in American history.

When you look at that record, the surprising thing is that Biden’s approval is at anything close to 40%. And it very likely won’t be for long; after a slight uptick in April and early May, it’s been all downhill. The three most recent reported polls, all taken this month, have his approval at an average of 36.7%. To my knowledge, no President has been re-elected with numbers like that.

So what should the Republicans adopt as their 2024 strategy? That’s easy: Make the election what elections usually are when an incumbent administration is seeking a second term, to wit, a referendum on that administration.

And what should the Democrats adopt as their strategy? That’s also easy: Talk about something else. And what are they going to talk about? That’s easy too, since they tell us every day. Just watch CNN or read the Washington Post or the New York Times.

What the Democrats talk about, with some asides about how it will be impossible for a raped 10 year-old to get an abortion anywhere this side of Mars, is January 6, and in particular how Donald Trump nearly pulled a coup. Indeed, with the record Biden is compiling, that’s already the main thing they’re talking about, and they’ve talked about it and talked about it for months.

So what’s the smart move for Republicans to counteract that strategy? Easy again: Nominate someone other than Donald Trump. And note that this is the right answer even if you believe, as I do, that Trump did good and important things for the country, particularly in re-shaping the Supreme Court — a step forward for American law and governance likely to have benefits for a long, long time. Or lowering taxes. Or supporting our soldiers rather than putting them in classes about which cisgender pronoun they need to be using.

The basics here are clear. The Republicans have candidates who will carry forward most if not all of Trump’s substantive policies while leaving behind his unfortunately serious failings in character and personality — failings that crystalized on January 6 and that are, to be clear, the Democrats’ only hope of victory.

Let me take the most prominent policy example, the Supreme Court. Yes, Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett were fine choices, but also choices any Republican President would have made or, at the minimum, looked at very carefully. And any Republican will want to rein in taxes, cut back on the antic regulations of the administrative state, deal more soberly with immigration, and build a military more geared toward killing the enemy than gushing sensitivity about all 37 (or whatever) genders.

And there’s one other ingredient in the mix — age. Trump will be 78 in 2024. That’s the same age Biden was when he took office. Most of Biden’s failures can be laid to the fact that he’s little more than a conduit for the increasingly radical Democratic mainstream, and that he was never all that bright to start with. But age is a factor, as even his allies are starting to acknowledge. I worked in the White House for a time, and I can tell you that the presidency requires an enormous amount of energy, breadth, focus, and mental agility. Trump at 78 will have more than Biden, yes — but he won’t have enough. Aging does sometimes play favorites, but not to that extent. Apart from everything else, Trump will be too old to be President, just as Biden is too old now.

The good news is that we have a tremendous choice of candidates — combat veteran and Harvard Law graduate Sen. Tom Cotton (age 45), the remarkably successful Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (age 43), Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and others.

If the Republicans nominate Donald Trump, they take a big risk that the Democrats will succeed in making the election a referendum on him. Given the woeful state of the country, that might not work anyway. But why take the chance? If the Republicans nominate virtually any of the other credible candidates, all solid conservatives, they keep the election a referendum on Biden’s administration (and this will be true even if Biden himself is not the candidate). On the present evidence, that’s an election they are all but sure to win.

UPDATE: There will be those who think that Trump “deserves” the nomination, because he was defrauded out of winning last time, and/or because he’s earned it in gratitude for the good things he did in office and/or for helping re-shape the Republican Party to broaden its appeal to working class voters and those who had become disaffected with standard-issue, Establishment-type candidates.

Along with Bill Barr, Andy McCarthy and almost every other astute observer, I do not think Trump was cheated out of winning. There was cheating to be sure, as there always is, but the case has not been made that it deprived him of enough votes to make the difference. But my conclusion that he should not be the nominee next time would be the same in any event.

Elections are not about getting mad or getting even. They are not about getting Cosmic Justice. They are about getting power. The only question serious people can ask themselves for the primary or on election day is which person and which party should wield the enormous power of the executive branch. Bill Buckley gave us the answer years ago: The reliably conservative candidate with the best chance of winning.

That is not Donald Trump. Putting to one side the question whether he is reliably conservative (his record on criminal justice was mixed, for example), Trump is the only candidate who would hand the Democrats a chance — indeed their only chance — of prevailing. As noted above, that would be to make the election something other than a referendum on their own performance. If that is the dominant issue, as it almost always is when the incumbent party is seeking four more years, the answer is going to be a big, fat “no.”

Let’s keep it right there. There is just too much chance a Trump candidacy would make the election a referendum about him, or at least would do so in the minds of a potentially decisive margin of voters. With a bevy of highly credentialed, young and fresh conservative candidates we can put forward, there is no sound reason to take that risk.