The Shrinking 2024 Election by Matthew Continetti

[mystery-ak]

The Shrinking 2024 Election
Column: The presidential field and map are growing smaller



Matthew Continetti   
March 24, 2023

First, some caveats. Election 2024 is more than a year and a half away. A week is a lifetime in politics. The future is never a straight-line projection of the present. Unexpected events shape outcomes in ways that are impossible to predict. And early frontrunners—Joe Lieberman in 2004, Hillary Clinton in 2008, Jeb Bush in 2016—often lose.

Still: One can’t help thinking, at this point in the cycle, the race for the presidency is remarkably static and fixed. An election with the potential to reshape American politics has drawn few polling leaders and opened no new battlegrounds. The stakes of the election expand while the presidential field, the number of swing states, and the pool of persuadable voters all contract. This should be the moment when our choices grow. They’re not.

The incumbent president is unpopular. Most people don’t want President Joe Biden to run for a second term, but he’s expected to do so anyway. Biden has said he is a transitional figure—and the transition may last a while. A Democratic primary remains an option, though an unlikely one. Inertia is a factor. So is the lack of a plausible alternative.

Biden is a known quantity. He doesn’t thrill voters, but in 2020 they considered him preferable to the alternatives. Not much has changed. The Progressive Left grumbles about Biden’s stances on crime and the southern border, but who would it put forward to replace him? And why would that candidate do any better than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) did four or eight years ago?

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https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-shrinking-2024-election/

[Fishrrman]

Matthew Continetti:
"One can’t help thinking, at this point in the cycle, the race for the presidency is remarkably static and fixed. An election with the potential to reshape American politics has drawn few polling leaders and opened no new battlegrounds. The stakes of the election expand while the presidential field, the number of swing states, and the pool of persuadable voters all contract. This should be the moment when our choices grow."

That's because the political "tilts" of nearly all the states is now fixed and predetermined.

California is going to vote blue.
New York is going to vote blue.
Illinois is going to vote blue.
etc.
Wyoming is going to vote red.
Iowa is going to vote red.
Texas is going to vote red.
etc.

The relatively few states that used to be "battlegrounds" are going to be focused upon by The Party, which will go full-tilt to maintain its "underground election apparatus" (which also includes "above-ground" components, such as mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, and ranked-choice voting) -- thus making it possible to CONTROL future critical elections in those states.

The effect will be elections that may "appear close" (and perhaps they actually are), but "the winner" will be the apparatus, which controls the ballots [not cast, but] received, and the counting thereof.

Thus, it will make little difference as to who is actually running, because one no longer will need to be an effective candidate with the apparatus behind you.

And if you're on the other (Republican) side, it won't matter that much, either. Whether it be Mr. Trump or Nikki Haley.

Because, they're not running against "the other candidate".
They're running against "the machine".

And... like Dr. McCoy once said to Captain Kirk:
"It's a machine, Jim... you can't argue with a machine."