The United States lives in permanent elections. Not a year has passed since the last elections and the rumor mill of the candidates for 2024 is unleashed. Will it be the second leg of 2024, with Joe Biden against Donald Trump? A new candidate in each party? Or Biden against a Republican different from Trump?
Apart from Biden and Trump, the Republican most likely (albeit a long way from the former president) is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has adopted a more 'Trumpist' stance than Trump himself, by assuming denialist positions on the issue of vaccines and even prevent state university professors from exercising their academic freedom and testifying in a voting regulation lawsuit that could prove the governor's rivals right.
Another candidate is the former Secretary of State and former Director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, who, although he has not spoken, has chosen the path of events to take the step that usually precedes an entry into the campaign (as demonstrated in his Trump and Biden day): get cosmetic surgery. In the case of Pompeo, to eliminate his more than remarkable belly, which could reduce the support they give him for his evangelical faith among the masses.
Another who aspires to the evangelical vote is the vice president with Trump, Mike Pence, but his chances are slim after the 'Trumpistas' who stormed the Capitol on January 6 chanted the slogan "Mike Pence must be hanged", because he does not he had invalidated the election results. Getting your voters to go from wanting to hang you to wanting to vote for you is, more than the terrain of elections, of miracles.
Also among the Republican candidates is the governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem, another who has decided to build her way to Washington based on not vaccinating her voters, and who last week gave the definitive signal that she is interested in the White House when he said: "I am not running for president."
None of them are among the favorites of the GOP establishment, who would prefer someone more centrist, like Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (who, of course, opposes COVID-19 vaccines).
But what the elites say matters little. Trump has taken control of that political formation. Between 67% and 78% of Republicans want the former president to run. Thus, Trump has ample justification for making a third attempt at the White House , especially if one takes into account his taste for being the center of attention, although others, such as his niece, Mary, believe that he will not exactly do it. for fear that his image of 'loser' will be consolidated.
If the former president wants to run, he has everything to win the nomination. But there is a small detail: being the candidate does not mean being the president. Trump left the White House with the lowest popularity since polls of the outgoing president's support began in 1945. And it doesn't seem to have improved. The average of the web specialized in statistics FiveThirtyEight says that 41.4% of Americans support him, compared to 53% who have an unfavorable opinion of him.
AN 83-YEAR-OLD BIDEN VS PETE BUTTIGIEG
Now, on the Democratic side, who will be in 2024? The first question is whether Joe Biden will repeat. During the 2020 campaign, the current president defined himself as "a transitional candidate" and said he would not run for reelection. As is usual in such cases, in his first press conference at the White House he declared that of course he was going to participate in 2024.
A Biden-Trump revival would be historic. There is only one precedent. It was in 1886. Republican Benjamin Harrison, who had won in 1882, tried to win a second term against Democrat Grover Cleveland, whom he had expelled from the White House. Cleveland won, making him the only person in US history to occupy the White House for two non-consecutive terms.
Could Trump get a repeat of Cleveland's play? To this day, it is impossible to know. It is possible that other elections between the two will be a reissue of the 2020, that is, an election in which people do not vote for someone, but against someone. And there, Trump seems to provoke more rejection. But there is still a long time.
And, in addition, there are the more than 200 measures launched by a series of states controlled by the Republicans to combat the "fraud" of 2020, despite the fact that to date only two cases of fraud have been detected, and in both cases Republicans who adopted other people's identities, in Texas and Pennsylvania, to vote twice for Trump.
In reality, those measures are designed to make the urban population, the lowest income, and minorities - that is, three groups that support Democrats -, have fewer polling stations, less time, and more paperwork to access. the polls. That can make conservative states like Arizona and Georgia where Biden narrowly won, thereby failing Republicans from whom they have yet to recover, inaccessible to the Democratic nominee, whoever he may be.
But what if Biden isn't that Democrat? The weight of age - 83 years in 2024 - can lead him not to attend, in a scenario that causes cold sweats to the Democratic Party, which believes that the current president is, with the limitations that he wants, his best candidate.
Without Biden, there are two names: Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Of them, 'a priori', the weakest is Harris. All the conspiracy theories that spoke of the former senator going to seize the springs of power in the White House and even force the resignation of Biden to be the president have fallen into the utmost ridicule.
Biden, in a show that he is much more awake than he appears, has politically liquidated Harris. In turn, this one, showing off its proverbial arrogance, lack of opportunity, self-centeredness, and organizational chaos, has not only buried its popularity at Trump's own levels but has also made the Democratic establishment reject it.
That opens a path to Buttigieg. Young - he will be 42 years old in 2024 -, centrist, technocrat, veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and educated with the highest academic distinctions, he also has the ability to attract the vote of the 'millennials' and the 'generation Z', two huge demographic groups that hardly feel represented in the current American political gerontocracy, dominated by people like Biden (78 years old), Trump (75 years old), the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (81 years old), or the leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer (71 years old).
But Buttigieg has a trait that introduces an element of uncertainty: she is married to a man, with whom she has just had a child. That not only alienates him from evangelical voters and from Catholics, but also from a key group for Democrats: African Americans. All the polls of the 2020 elections, in which Buttigieg already ran for the White House with more than acceptable results, showed that his popularity 'pricked' among the black vote. And a Democrat cannot win if that support, just as a Republican will never reach the White House if the Evangelicals do not vote for him.
So the pre-campaign has started. Harris' advisers have already announced that a primary against Buttigieg would be "tough and difficult." And on Monday, Roger Stone, Donald Trump's adviser and confidant - who even forgave his jail sentence for his involvement in the 'Russian plot' - released a public message to the governor of Florida the day before yesterday on the far-right social network Parler: "Will Ron DeSantis pledge, if he wins reelection in 2022, not to abandon Florida and not face the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump? " There are three years left and the race for the White House is already on full throttle.
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Mr. Trump is now another censored white man.
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