A 2024 race no one wants
Bad vs worse
When the Deseret News approached me a few months back about writing a big piece on the 2024 race, I will admit I was a bit stumped.
I couldn’t seem to figure out a unifying theme of the race — or anything terribly interesting to say about it. There was no fresh face or new wrinkle. And voters didn’t seem particularly thrilled about their options either.
That’s when I realized it: The lack of excitement and energy was the story!
Here’s the opening of the piece:
What if they held an election no one really wanted?
Well, that’s exactly what 2024 is shaping up to be.
Consider a late August Associated Press poll. Voters were asked to name a word or two that came to mind for each of the front-runners for their respective party nominations — President Joe Biden for Democrats and former President Donald Trump for Republicans.
The most common words for Biden? “Old.” “Outdated.” “Slow.” “Confused.”
For Trump, it wasn’t any better. “Corrupt,” “crooked” and “bad” led the way.
And these are the two people with massive leads over their prospective primary opponents! What must people think about the rest of the field?
At the same time, someone has to win this election. And the overwhelming odds are that someone will be named either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, whose victory or loss may be decided by several thousand voters in a quartet of swing states.
You can — and I hope you do! — read the whole thing here. As a special surprise, I make a prediction of who I think will win the 2024 presidential race at the end of the piece!
If people aren't excited, and by excited I mean terrified, about this race, it says more about the idiocy of the electorate than anything else. I'm 54, in PA. I sent money to Joe in the primaries and I'm sending him money now. And frankly, if you want to quibble about his age or policy as opposed to a FASCIST FUCKING DICTATORSHIP, I don't know what to do for you.
I'll excuse your penultimate paragraph, the one in which you downplayed Trump's attempts to contest a 2024 election because he “doesn’t have his hands on any of the levers of government power,” because that changed yesterday. The fact that the new speaker of the House is one of the key players in the 2021 attempted coup should worry us all.