Return to Normalcy

The 2024 Election is still 11 months again, but the stage is set - a battle for the "normie vote."

As a veteran of 35 US Senate and House campaigns in 25 states over three decades of political work (all but one for Republicans), I learned two important lessons early on.

First, framing the question voters will answer as they cast their ballot. Ronald Reagan famously did this during his final debate with President Jimmy Carter in 1980. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The race was practically tied - Carter led in many polls - until that moment. There was a nearly 10 percent shift afterward, the weekend before the election, mostly in undecided independent-leaning voters. Carter pollster, the late Pat Cadell, informed Carter that he would lose on election day.

Everything we did in every campaign where I had any influence was making sure my candidate was the answer to that question. It worked more often than not if the political environment and the resources cooperated. A former Member of Congress I worked and campaigned with once wisely told me that campaigns and candidates might influence three percent of the vote. The political environment determined the rest. In a close election, however, campaigns matter. It’s why so many campaign dollars disproportionately reach competitive campaigns.

It is one reason why I disfavor most early voting as we have in Virginia. Our election “day” extends a ridiculous 45 days, often before debates and final arguments are presented to voters. There is so much wrong with that. While retrieving ballots cast as new information comes to light in five states is technically possible, Virginia is not one of them.

There are advantages to early voting for campaigns. It allows political parties and candidates to focus resources on those who haven’t voted. If you’re a partisan whose mind was made up early and is unlikely to be changed, early voting is for you.

Second, late-deciding, more independent-minded, less partisan voters are less interested in issues than trusting the candidates who would address them. After all, most voters are focused on real-life issues - their jobs, their mortgages, putting food on the table and gas in their cars, their kids’ educations, and public safety. They aren’t thinking about ways to trim a $34 trillion federal deficit, how many new billion-dollar F-35s we need to build, or whether the FBI needs a new building in Virginia or Maryland (answer: neither). They’re worried more about how to replace the decade-old family sport utility vehicle with over 100,000 miles, balding tires, and a state safety inspection coming up while it’s making funny noises. And what kind of nonsense are their kids being taught at the local public school, not to mention wondering what a gallon of milk costs them at the local Harris Tweeter or Publix?

With growing certainty about the presidential ballot contest later this year - barring the unknown or unforeseen (unknown unknowns, to paraphrase the late Donald Rumsfeld), it looks to be a replay of the Covid-clouded 2020 contest - it’s not too early to answer our two questions.

First, let’s set the stage. Where might voters’ minds be right now? In a replay of then-candidate Warren G. Harding’s successful 1920 campaign, a “return to normalcy” is likely to be reprised. They thought they were voting that way in 2020 with Joe Biden’s victory but have been sorely disappointed, if not defrauded. It is also evident that a Biden-Trump ballot is not what they sought, and why many might vote for one of the other candidates on the ballot - or stay home.

Harding and his campaign looked a lot like Donald Trump’s. He ran on an America First platform and untangling American engagements overseas. He died of a heart attack not long into his presidency. At age 57, he was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge. Trump appears in fine mental and physical shape but will be 78 years old on election day. At that age, things can begin to change relatively quickly. Biden as President compares alarmingly to Joe Biden as Vice President. Go back and watch YouTube videos. You’ll see the difference.

It has been tumultuous seven years since Donald Trump was elected. It’s not his fault - he’s more the symptom than the cause. The “no drama Obama” years eventually frustrated and disappointed millions of Americans with his failure to breach racial strife, screw up health care by trying to nationalize it (it is still screwed up), and an open and arrogant “I’m smarter than you, you bitter clingers” disdain for the plight of working-class Americans.

Add to that an inept and equally arrogant Hillary Clinton campaign, and you open the door for Americans voting with their middle fingers at Washington’s self-dealing elite.

This time, they’re voting with both middle fingers in full salute.

After a barrage of eight million illegal aliens waltzing across our southern border with easier access to affordable (free) baby formula than they can get, a humiliating and inept Afghanistan surrender, a flaccid and weak if inept foreign policy, personally profiting from his family’s influence peddling, and nearly three trillion dollars added to our national debt in just one year, not to mention the revelation of crazy wokeness in our institutions, they’ve had enough. Corporate wokeness and anti-semitic college campuses and their acquiescing presidents have woken up many Americans to the reality around them.

A forty percent increase in the money supply by profligate politicians sent the cost of everything soaring over the past two years. While inflation is abating, those high prices are not.

The Trump years look good, even normal, despite his Covid mismanagement. A normalcy they miss, with $2 gasoline, affordable and ample groceries, a growing economy, and no wars abroad. That’s why even independent voters favor Trump in polling over Biden, who begins 2024 in the worst political shape of any incumbent president in recent history.

Older voters, including radio talker Hugh Hewitt, are eerily reminded of 1968. So am I. That year, following four tulmultuous years of the Lyndon Johnson presidency following a traumatic assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Americans were weary of a badly mismanaged Vietnam War with hundreds of American dead reported by Walter Cronkite on the evening news every week, civil rights discord and anti-war riots and demonstrations across America, rising crime, and massive growth in government (Medicare was created) and dramatic changes in our immigration laws. Americans needed a breather and a return to something resembling normal.

Americans have been feted to yet more overseas debacles, including Biden’s mismanagement and ineptness in Afghanistan, timid execution of support for Ukraine against Soviet adventurism Putin’s invasion while enabling the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, and massive spending for new government programs, including the mislabeled “Inflation Reduction Act.”

In 1968, voters turned to a former losing presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, in a surprisingly close election over Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, saddled with Johnson’s record. A third-party candidate, Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a former Democrat, won a surprising 13 percent of the national vote.

As 1920 was a response to the tumultuous Woodrow Wilson years (who ended his presidency largely disabled after a debilitating stroke during his final term), 2024 might look like 1968. Ironically, the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago in 1968 and returns there to a mayor - very much unlike Richard M. Daley - who is a soft-on-crime wokester in August. Oh boy.

And you think the pro-genocidal “from the river to the sea” protests are interesting, now. Just wait.

Anti-war protesters battle Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Republicans will convention in Milwaukee a month earlier.

Eight million immigrants have practically waltzed across the southern US border since Biden took office, making no effort to turn away people migrating purely for economic reasons, as the law requires. Migrants have been given court dates for years, if not decades, into the future, which they will likely skip. Meanwhile, they’ve been traversed at your expense, in most cases, to the cities and jurisdictions of their choice, crippling local governments with housing and related costs.

Meanwhile, Americans see through the Democrat’s “threat to our democracy” gaslighting. At the same time, its operatives shut down Trump by unleashing our legal system against him and denying voters in Maine and Colorado the opportunity to vote for him.

Voters rightly think that Democracy is supposed to be about them. They rightly believe that voters, not partisan political elites, get to pick their presidents, senators, and congresspeople.

Voters see a do-nothing Administration as crime increases and public resources are strained. Worse, they see an inept, impaired, and at 81, a very old president they are convinced is not up for the job, especially for another four years.

Yes, much drama is still to be played out without a single vote yet cast in any caucus or primary and tinderboxes worldwide, if not in the United States. But the stage is being set very early for the 2024 elections.

Don’t take my word for it. John Halpin, writing for the Democrat-leaning The Liberal Patriot on Substack, notes this:

Huge percentages of Americans have already determined how they will vote this November in a likely rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. In the fall wave of the TLP/YouGov presidential tracking poll, 88 percent of voters say they will support either Biden or Trump, with 12 percent unsure or leaning towards a third candidate or saying they won’t vote. 

There’s really nothing anyone can say or do to get these hard-core supporters of each candidate to consider switching sides. These voters are locked-in at this point, so both parties will dedicate enormous sums of money and brainpower trying to figure out how to bring more of their own people to the polls this fall.

The real contested battle for the presidency lies among a mixed group of less engaged Americans who fall into two basic categories of what are often called “normie voters”: people who dislike politics, don’t care much for either Biden or Trump, hold mainstream views, and just want stable and secure lives for their families without a lot of drama. Some of these voters are still deciding and others are considering whether to vote at all.

Hewitt cites Peggy Noonan - no fan of Trump - and her early 2016 analysis of the election as being between the “protected” and the “unprotected,” or those struggling to wonder how they will pay their next rent while being maxed out on their credit cards, vulnerable to the unexpected.

Whether Donald Trump will make 2024 about him or a choice again is the question. I warned four years ago that if Trump made 2020 about him instead of the voter’s choice between competing visions and records, he would lose. He did, and he did. If he can check his narcissistic impulses for 11 months, he might be able to win another term as President.

As for Joe Biden, he will be back in his basement with rare, carefully controlled appearances on good days, hoping Trump will self-destruct. It worked last time.

This may be the biggest year for elections around the world, ever. From “News Items by John Ellis, citing Politico.com:

Dubbed the biggest election year in history, more than 60 countries representing half the world population — some 4 billion people — will hold regional, legislative and presidential elections that look set to shake up political institutions and ramp up geopolitical tensions. As the United States looks inward, bracing for a likely showdown between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, other countries are also preparing for possible incumbent oustings, raucous public protests and populist movements with the potential to destabilize larger regions.

It’s not just Americans waging a populist uprising. Look for repeats of Argentina’s Javier Miliel’s upset win in places like neighboring Chile. Wouldn’t it be nice if Mexico could elect a president not beholden to criminal drug and human smuggling cartels along our border.

I’m wagering no money on the presidential election just yet. But the job is likely Trump’s for the taking if he stays out of his own way.