One of the odder phenomena of the 2024 presidential election is a certain 2020 Democratic candidate who has strayed very far since then. I took a look at her options at New York:
A month ago, when ex-Democratic congresswoman and 2020 presidential wannabe Tulsi Gabbard showed up at a Mar-a-Lago event, I wrote about the logic that could make her a highly unconventional but not entirely implausible 2024 running mate for Donald Trump. Once a major backer of Bernie Sanders, Gabbard’s trajectory toward MAGA-land has been steady since she left the Democratic Party in the fall of 2022, a main course she served up with a side dish of jarring candidate endorsements (e.g., of J.D. Vance). Even when she was still a Democrat running for president, though, her orientation was more MAGA-adjacent than you might expect, as Geoffrey Skelley explained in 2019:
“Gabbard’s supporters … are more likely to have backed President Trump in 2016, hold conservative views or identify as Republican compared to voters backing the other candidates. …
“In fact, Gabbard has become a bit of a conservative media darling in the primary, with conservative commentators like Ann Coulter and pro-Trump social media personalities like Mike Cernovich complimenting her for her foreign policy views. In a primary in which some 2020 Democratic contenders have boycotted Fox News, Gabbard has regularly appeared on the network. Just last week, Gabbard even did an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, a far-right political outlet. She’s also made appeals outside the political mainstream by going on The Joe Rogan Experience — one of the most popular podcasts in the country and a favored outlet for members of the Intellectual Dark Web, whose purveyors don’t fit neatly into political camps but generally criticize concepts such as political correctness and identity politics.”
So her parting blast at Democrats as controlled by an “elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness” didn’t come out of nowhere.
But much as Gabbard might be an outside-the-box running mate for the 45th president, it does seem there is another 2024 presidential candidate whose extreme hostility to mainstream institutions and difficult-to-categorize views might make him a better match for her: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And sure enough, according to NBC News, the wiggy anti-vaxxer is interested in Gabbard:
“The four-term former member of Congress from Hawaii is now getting consideration for both former President Donald Trump’s and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tickets, two sources familiar with the candidates’ deliberations told NBC News.”
The prospect of choosing between these two politicians appears to have left Gabbard feeling she’s in the catbird seat:
“As one source said, Gabbard would be more likely to seriously consider running as Kennedy’s vice presidential nominee had she not been swept up by the possibility of serving with Trump. This person said Gabbard ‘was enticed’ by the chance of serving on Kennedy’s ticket but is now focused on the possibility that Trump will select her.
“’My understanding is that Tulsi is convinced that Trump is going to pick her,’ this person said. ‘Had that not been the case, she probably would have gone with Kennedy.’”
Since Kennedy has scheduled a running-mate reveal for March 26 in Oakland, we’ll know soon enough whether he chose Gabbard and Gabbard chose him. Others rumored to be on his short list include New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, and California entrepreneur and major RFK Jr. donor Nicole Shanahan.
As NBC notes, it’s more than a bit unusual for people to be considered for multiple presidential tickets:
“[I]t’s exceedingly rare for a politician to attract interest from more than one presidential ticket or party. (Ahead of the 1952 election, Democrats and Republicans led dueling efforts to draft another politically ambiguous veteran, Dwight Eisenhower, the former supreme Allied commander in Europe during World War II, for the presidential race.)”
It’s hard to say what Tulsi Gabbard would think of this comparison. After all, Ike was a bit of a warmonger.
So when will the exit polls finally say that Bush lost?????
(and what Joe said above)
Joe: That’s easy. For one thing, the Hispanic vote wasn’t as large as billed but it was still a gain for Bush — same with Catholics.
More importantly, Republican and conservative turnout was way up, women voted much more Republican, and upper income people both increased their turnout and voted more Republican.
There you go, Joe. The mystery of Bush’s 3 point margin all cleared up!
You know, Ruy did explain that one (look for his immediate post-election posts): we got absolutely hosed among non-college whites (evangelical and otherwise), who broke Republican more than they have before, and we didn’t improve our national performance among Latinos (although we did improve in NDN-targeted swing states like CO and FL). We need to become competitive again among non-college whites outside the Northeast, so that the “southwestern strategy” doesn’t become our only possible path to 270 next time out. And we need to improve our Latino performance, rather than patting ourselves on the back because we’re not slipping all that much. Ruy and almost everyone else here know all these things already. (Simon Rosenberg knows them backwards and forwards, which is why he’s my pick, right now, for DNC chair.)
I’ve always suspected that the hispanic vote was less Republican than those early polls showed. And looking at the county results, they aren’t significantly different than the 2000 results; in Texas, Kerry gained about 1 percent from Gore’s Texas numbers, and Bush improved by about 1.5 percent. Only a handful of counties changed sides, mostly a few western counties switching to Bush, while Austin’s Travis County switched Democrat.
And to answer the question above, the black vote is only about 19 percent of the national vote, at most, and the hispanic vote, while about the same, is not as monolithically Democrat as the black vote. Hispanics in 2000 favored Gore, true, but 1 in 3 voted Bush, while less than 1 in 10 blacks voted Bush in 2000.
The evangelical percentage for Bush was the same, but the actual number of evangelicals voting was slightly higher. Statistics can be so slippery!
And the Catholic vote was still 50/50. Frankly, I’ve always thought that it was odd to still treat as broad a religion as Roman Catholic as if it were a monolithic group. To use an anecdotal example, one of my friends is a white pro-choice Catholic Democrat, and another is an asian pro-life Catholic Democrat. One is from VA and one os from OH. All they have in common is that they got baptised the same way. I think it’s time we stopped calling “Catholic” a group the same way we call races groups.
Does this mean that Bush catered to the wrong folks with his Commerce and AG pick??
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1. Re Ruy and Steve — as I understand it, the state exit polls and the NEP are separate and autonomous; as such… while one can be used to call into question the other, I don’t understand why changes in one mean that the other number, reliable or not, is to be altered commensurately.
2. Joe — because white married Protestants without college degrees are both numerous and shifted really strongly against the Dems.
And because we ought to remember that going from +0.5 to -2.8 – the Dems didn’t do THAT much worse.
Maybe those nomination announcements were made a bit prematurely… A.G. Gonzales and Commerce Secretary Gutierrez’s days may already be numbered.
Ruy: Can you please explain how,
if the Hispanic vote wasn’t as high for Bush as previously thought,
if the African American vote still went Democratic,
if the Catholic vote for Kerry wasn’t as low as it was thought to be and
that the Evangelical vote for Bush wasn’t measureably higher than 2000,
how, in 2004, did Bush win and Kerry lose?
I’ve been saying this, the future of the Democratic land base lies in the Southwest, not the Southeast. New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and eventually even Arizona will come our way. Many years from now, even Texas may become a swing state.