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Enough With the Parlor Games

None of Us Know Where 2024 Is Headed

By Reed Galen

 

Earlier this year, Joe Trippi, Rick Wilson and I were speaking to a group in California. During Q+A someone asked who do we think is going to run for president in 2024. Trippi answered succinctly: “It doesn’t matter.” This is not what the crowd wanted to hear, howls of “It does!” filled the room. But Joe persisted: “None of us, not one of us in this room, or anyone, knows where we’ll be a year from now.”

Trippi is right, which is why clickbait stories about whether President Joe Biden will run again or if Ron DeSantis is heir-apparent to Donald Trump are nine months early. We’re five months from the next version of the most important election of our lifetimes and folks – Republicans, Democrats and the media are looking into a crystal ball that has nothing to offer. With the future of American democracy on the line, the politico-media elite can’t help but get a jump on the future.

But…Since you’re already here, let’s discuss why neither you, me nor anyone else knows what the 2024 field will look like.

The Longest of Long Shots

Since 2000, 113 men and women have run for their respective party’s presidential nomination. Of those, four have become President of the United States. Some have been well funded (like Jeb Bush and his $100 million super PAC) others have come from nowhere (Bernie Sanders 2016) but ultimately fell short.

No one thought Bill “The Comeback Kid” Clinton would survive a third-place finish in New Hampshire to not only be the Democratic nominee, but unseat an incumbent who only a few months early had seen his approval ratings above 90%.

In the summer of 2007 Senator John McCain’s campaign (of which I was a part then) seemed headed for the exits. But he went to New Hampshire and hung on – as he did so, the rest of his opponents flamed out. Remember when Rudy Giuliani (!) was expected to be the favorite?

Did anyone expect that a young senator named Barack Obama, only two years into his first term, to best Hillary Clinton in 2008? We can say it all makes sense now, but that’s the inevitability of history creeping in on us.

On the strength of one speech in Iowa, one, then Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, vaulted to the top of the 2015 presidential field. He raised a bunch of money and was considered a serious contender. By September, he was broke and out of the race.

Even in 2020, when it appeared that a progressive candidate would win the Democratic nomination, Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Joe Biden ahead of the South Carolina primary and the multiple endorsements/dropouts among the moderates decided the nomination. I’m not sure we’ve seen anything like it previously and it’s hard to see it happening again.

Deep Vetting and the Discount Rate

Unless a candidate has run for, and made a credible run at, a major party nomination, they haven’t received the true political colonoscopy that comes with the territory. Sure, there will be some oppo drops among lesser candidates as they fight to survive in a crowded field, but until a contender passes that hazy threshold from ‘aspirant’ to potential nominee, they haven’t begun to understand what running for president really means.

It’s not just their opponents trying to knife them in the press, with key state leaders or with voters, it’s the day-in and day-out grind that a national campaign entails. Suddenly dozens, perhaps hundreds of old girlfriends, classmates, business associates, former staffers appear out of the woodwork looking for their 15 minutes of fame. Some candidates and campaigns can handle it, some flail.

Think you can keep the local and national press corps out of your events? Good luck getting any coverage at all. If your campaign doesn’t give them a story to write, they’ll find one on their own. Think you’ve read a cringy, horrific process story? Wait until they get ahold of the drunk advance guy in Ottumwa and see how it goes.

Many people, even to this day, don’t understand how someone as boorish as Donald Trump could capture a national party and then the presidency. He’s so awful, rude, and ugly, that surely the better angels of our nature would prevent such a creature from ascending to the highest office it the land.

What many of us missed is that throughout Trump’s nearly 50 year public persona, he never attempted to be anything other than what he was. He’s been a bully since childhood. A charlatan since his 20s. An ass all his life. That he was these things was no surprise to voters and subsequently, didn’t cost him with voters – in fact many of these traits helped fashion, in just under a decade, a new Republican Party in his orange-tinged image.

Most candidates, though, want to create a perfected, stylized version of themselves for donors, voters and the press. They want to take strong, moral stands on issues and tell their supporters they’ll fight for them like no one else ever has. They want to drain the swamp, clean up Washington or do all the right things for all the right reasons.

Inevitably, though, humanity enters the chat and the delta between a candidate’s image and their reality can precipitate an unstoppable fall. Voters feel like they had the wool pulled over their eyes and they punish their favorite accordingly. There is an inherent Catch-22 in this as strategists know about their client’s shortcomings but too often take the ‘ignore it and it will go away’ theory. Their issues never go away.

Early State Blues

Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada (We Matter!) are the states in which a hopeful must do well (pending changes by the Democratic National Committee.) They’re small, quirky and their citizens absolutely believe in their right and obligation to help winnow presidential fields. They don’t care what state you’re from, they don’t care how big you won your last election. They don’t care how many national donors have flocked to you or that the media is following you around.

Iowans want to size up candidates. They want you to sit at the VFW in Grinnell and answer their questions for hours. They want to see you get your haircut in Indianola. They will brook no arrogance or entitlement among those who’ve come as supplicants to the Hawkeye State.

Iowans make the folks in New Hampshire seem downright friendly. The Granite State likes the iconoclasts, they like people who speak their minds and those that tell Iowa to piss off. But they want you to remember that candidates need them far more than the reverse. It’s also an open primary state so a campaign may be facing members of the opposite party who might just vote for your person – but only if you spend the requisite time in the small state’s 500 different legislative seats and travel from the Seacoast to Manchester and back again.

Bottomline: Don’t bring your big state, big name, big ego to these states and expect it to fly. Trump, as always, was the anomaly. Anyone else who expects the bully mentality to work might well find themselves ridden out of town on a rail (ask Rudy how much he likes New Hampshire.)

The Republicans

If you’re a Republican, it doesn’t matter which candidate you like right now. When and if Donald Trump decides to run again, he will be the nominee. He could wait until the filing deadline in Iowa and still win the 2024 caucuses.

Or…He may decide to announce tomorrow. None of us will know. Why, because Trump doesn’t know.

Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, The Rat Pack (Cruz, Cotton, Hawley,) none of them can go toe to toe with Trump.

On the flipside, if Trump decides NOT to run, he will wait as long as possible to announce it. There’s nothing he loves more than causing pain and watching potential rivals twist. Just like horses in a starting gate, Trump will delight in watching them strain at the reins.

What is clear is that #MAGA has gotten out of the cage. There are voters who disliked Trump’s antics but ‘liked his policies.’ Now, the monster is on the loose – they have all the ugliness that ‘normal’ Republicans can’t abide but no other redeeming features. Who are these people? They’re the 24% of Pennsylvania Republican primary voters who voted for Kathy Barnett despite Trump’s endorsement of Dr. Oz. They’re pure, unadulterated, uncut Ultra MAGA.

The Democrats

We get asked a lot about whether President Biden will run again. I don’t know, and maybe three people in the world know (and two of them are the Bidens.) But he is president, which means HE will decide if he’s going to run again – he sits at the Resolute Desk everyday.

The other Democrats itching to get another bite at the apple should be patient. Many of them are young and have time. Those that have passed the age of 70 should accept that their time has come and gone – both your party and the country are looking for something new (pending Biden’s decision.)

In the meantime, Biden is the leader of your party. Put your ambition aside for now. Focus on November 2022 and winning where you can.

What It Takes

If you have not read Richard Ben Cramer’s opus on the 1988 presidential campaign, What It Takes, order it as soon as you’re done reading this. It features, among others, a guy named Biden, another guy named Bush and many others you’ll recognize as you read. What Cramer was able to capture in his thousand-page odyssey is that most candidates don’t possess “what it takes.”

What does that mean?

It means being in Iowa for four rallies during the day and a fundraiser in Chicago that night. It means spending days and weeks away from home, family, and normalcy under the klieg lights and before the microphones. It will be the little gaffes, the major gaffes, the bad staff work, the process stories that drive the headquarters nuts – all of it adds up.

It means doing what is necessary to win the highest office in the land regardless of how it makes you feel personally.

It means driving the knife deeper into an opponent, even an old friend, because you have an abiding ambition to be Leader of the Free World.

Almost everyone that runs for president looks in the mirror and believes they possess this quality. They do not. And too many of them spend years of their time and millions of donors’ dollars to figure that out.

Get Back to Work

There are five months until Election Day 2022. Nothing less than the future of the Republic rests on the outcome. For those 150 days, put your ambition on hold and make sure that when we wake up on November 9, we have a country starting to come back into focus.

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