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GELFAND’S WORLD - It's here. The 2024 presidential election season is officially on. Iowans will caucus Monday evening -- at least the Republicans will. It will be cold, as only those who have trudged through zero degree temperatures in the face of strong winds will understand. Too bad, Iowans, you insisted on being first.
Being first has advantages. Presidential candidates come to your diners and town halls so you can meet with them personally. You think that you are somehow entitled to this level of kowtowing from the candidates. So let's see if you even show up on Monday night.
The Democratic Party should have put the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primary out of their misery years ago. They are about as unrepresentative as it is possible to be, and they have done nothing to deserve the kind of treatment they get from the candidates. When was the last time that a presidential candidate shook your hand here in California? But back in the old days, one candidate figured out that winning in Iowa would get him the publicity that he could not get otherwise, so he basically spent his whole campaign in Iowa, and therefore won in the caucuses. This gave him a strong head start in New Hampshire, and the result was that every future candidate had to spend resources in Iowa.
Two of the least representative states in the union got all the early publicity. What the pundits fail to point out is how lousy these two states have been in their judgment. Here are a few of the former winners in Iowa:
Mike Huckabee (2008)
(admittedly Obama also won that year, but he came from the adjacent state)
Rick Santorum (2012)
Ted Cruz (2016)
How about New Hampshire? It's a longer list, but here are a few:
Pat Buchanan, John McCain (twice), George W Bush, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump
Even for Democratic candidates, New Hampshire voters show little imagination or judgement. Here are a few of the prior winners:
Hart, Dukakis, Tsongas.
In previous columns, I've analyzed New Hampshire results and found that the voters tend to support candidates from immediately adjacent states and closely adjacent states. That's how Tsongas beat Bill Clinton, how Muskie won, and so on. It's hardly ever been a fair fight in New Hampshire.
This year of 2024 is now upon us
This is certainly an unusual year, what with two incumbents running against each other. Biden is an actual incumbent, and Trump continues to claim that he should be.
Here's one little shot of humor that we might as well get through right now. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R: Pistol Grip, CO) made the following statement:
"You've got to appreciate the irony of climate protestors trudging through a foot of snow and -30 degree wind chills to yell about how the planet is warming. They just don't see it, do they?"
Wow. This was old and discredited when Rush Limbaugh used to use it. Yes, it is still possible to have a cold spot in the winter even as summer temperatures, hurricanes, and floods hit in the other 10 months. Or, as attributed to Chris Hayes:
"Snow-trolling: A yearly event wherein conservatives try to use winter, snow, and ice to deny global warming."
All this by way of stating the obvious, but which has to be stated: The party of Trump has made itself into the party of lies. The Trump supporters who will flock to the caucuses in Iowa and a bit later to the primary in New Hampshire are either the most gullible people on earth or else they relish having a liar on their side. I'm going to guess that it's a little of each.
It's been more than 3 years since the 2020 presidential election. You would think that if there were the least bit of evidence of election rigging, that we would have seen some by now. Every item that was ever claimed has been shot down. Claims that went to court were rejected. Journalists and law enforcement who investigated such claims found nothing. But a substantial number of Trump supporters continue to make such claims, whether they really believe them or not.
This is the situation we face as we approach the 2024 elections. The strong majority who voted for Biden will presumably vote against Trump this time around. But Trump supporters go into the election season believing that only mass dishonesty could cost their candidate the victory. It's a curious sort of situation that threatens the overall acceptance of the democratic process. The most likely scenario is that Biden will win, and that Donald Trump and his most dedicated followers will once again claim that they were robbed.
Unusual factors in a presidential election year
A substantial number of years ago, one national magazine ran an essay on the predictable aftermath to the Supreme Court overturning the Roe v Wade decision. If memory serves me, it had a title referring to the day after Roe v Wade is overturned. It took longer than a day, but the predictions in that long ago essay are coming true. People who would not otherwise vote for Democrats or for state ballot initiatives have been doing so in surprising numbers.
We can expect this effect to continue into the presidential elections. But the more important effect, if it occurs, would be on Senatorial and House elections. Voters will be told that they need to vote for Democratic senatorial candidates to protect themselves in the event that Trump is elected. They will also be told to vote for Biden so as to protect themselves from the sworn antiabortion candidates running on the Republican side.
Will this effect be enough to turn a close election into a blue wave? I suspect that a lot of this will depend on how well the Republican candidates manage to fend off the prochoice movements in their own states. We can expect that there will be at least a couple of Republican senatorial candidates who will blow it bigtime by making some remarkably ignorant comment about reproductive physiology. It's happened before.
And there is that other factor. Just in case you haven't heard, one of the two candidates expected to emerge from the primaries is under indictment for multiple felonies. This is a first in American electoral politics. There are those who believe -- in perfect cynicism -- that Trump's Supreme Court appointees will save his bacon. I have no love (and little respect) for those appointees, but I would like to think that they will be able to resist the temptation to turn this country into a dictatorship. Others point out that the Supreme Court has plenty of reasons for avoiding such a stupid turn, beginning with the fact that they would be empowering Joe Biden to act the way Trump did.
It should be an interesting season, particularly with respect to the non-presidential races. The big story will develop if the D.C. criminal trial of Donald J Trump is allowed to begin in the spring or summer of this year -- that is to say, during the peak of the presidential campaign. Wouldn't that be one for the history books.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
