In the restless search among Republicans for a way to avoid more undiluted Trumpism, rival candidates are choosing some pretty bad messages, as I noted at New York:

Naturally former vice-president Mike Pence wants to rebrand himself in his 2024 presidential campaign. He’s known to the world as the cringingly obsequious Trump sidekick who refused to give the Boss the unconstitutional boost he needed to stop Joe Biden’s confirmation as president-elect on January 6, 2021. In MAGA land, he will never, ever be forgiven for this “betrayal” of Donald Trump. In seeking a new identity, Pence is unsurprisingly returning to his pre-Trump image as a methodical movement-conservative warhorse with a particular connection to the Christian right (albeit one whose political career all but self-immolated thanks to his clumsy handling of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Indiana).

In campaigning as the man who can return the GOP and the country to pre-Trump conservatism, Pence is obviously scratching a deep itch among Republican elites who want to imagine that the 45th presidency was just a nightmare that produced a lot of madness and some nice tax cuts. There’s a big problem, though. Practically everything the former veep wants the GOP to stand for is deeply unpopular, as this summary of the Pence message from the New York Times illustrates:

“Mr. Pence is working to carve out space in the Republican primary field by appealing to evangelicals, adopting a hard-line position in support of a federal abortion ban, promoting free trade and pushing back against Republican efforts to police big business on ideological grounds. He faces significant challenges, trails far behind in the polls and has made no effort to channel the populist energies overtaking the Republican Party.”

Imposing a strict national abortion ban is very unpopular outside (and to some extent inside) the Republican base, as Trump has repeatedly acknowledged. Free trade is a creed as outmoded as the free coinage of silver and is anathema in much of the heartland areas Republicans rely on. “Populist” conservative efforts to mess with corporate policies are irresponsible and hard to maintain, yet they help insulate Republicans from their ancient image as Wall Street toadies. But Pence’s unpopularity contest doesn’t end there:

“Unlike almost every major Republican running for president, Mr. Pence still defends former President George W. Bush’s decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, though he acknowledged in the interview that the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ intelligence that Mr. Bush used to justify the Iraqi invasion was wrong.”

And for dessert:

“Mr. Pence says Social Security and Medicare must be trimmed back as part of any serious plan to deal with the national debt …

“Mr. Pence said he would ‘explain to people’ how the ‘debt crisis’ would affect their children and grandchildren. He says his plan to cut benefits won’t apply to Social Security and Medicare payments for people in retirement today or who will retire in the next 25 years. But he will pitch ideas to cut spending for people under 40.”

Social Security and Medicare cuts are nearly as unpopular among Republican voters as they are among Democratic and independent voters, which is very unpopular indeed. And Republican politicians (most notably and recently George W. Bush and Paul Ryan) have forever sought to “explain to people” why it’s somehow fair to literally grandfather in the retirement benefits of old folks while screwing over their children and grandchildren with half a loaf or less. It hasn’t worked.

The axiom Pence is running on is simple: There was nothing wrong with old-school Reagan-Bush Republicanism until the Bad Man came along (with Pence’s sycophantic help, by the way) to wreck everything with his demagogic heresies. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, there was a lot wrong with where Republicans were heading going into 2016, beginning with the simple fact that the non-college-educated white voters on which the GOP had begun to depend didn’t like free trade, slavery to big business, “entitlement reform,” or “forever wars” and warmed to a presidential candidate who pledged to overturn the party Establishment that promoted these shibboleths as though they came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets. If Pence succeeds in making himself known as the would-be president who wants to get rid of half of Trump’s more popular positions, his own popularity (his favorable-unfavorable ratio according to the FiveThirtyEight polling averages is 36-53) is likely to fade even more as voters begin to understand him.

As an old guy with a pretty good memory of political events, I am alert to misuses of history to make a contemporary point, like the one I tried to expose this week at New York.

The same day that Donald Trump, the GOP’s front-running candidate for president, got assessed millions of dollars for defamation and sexual abuse, a leading conservative media maven, Hugh Hewitt, adjudged Joe Biden as so absolutely doomed that he won’t even make it to the 2024 starting gate. RealClearPolitics relays Hewitt’s tall tale of a prediction:

“Hugh Hewitt on Monday told Special Report host Bret Baier he expects President Joe Biden to exit the presidential race like President Lyndon B. Johnson did in 1968. LBJ announced in March of 1968 that he would not seek another term …

“’Gallup came in at 38 percent approval. So the ABC/Washington Post poll at 36 does not sound like an outlier … I think the American people coming to the recognition he really can’t do this,’ Hewitt said.

“’I’m expecting an LBJ ’68 exit sometime next year,’ Hewitt said.”

What Hewitt was referring to was the surprise announcement by President Lyndon Johnson on March 31, 1968, in conjunction with a bombing halt in Vietnam, that he was withdrawing from the Democratic presidential contest. But the idea that Biden will face anything like the circumstances that led LBJ to that decision is ridiculous, even for a spinmeister like Hewitt.

First, to get one dubious data point out of the way, Hewitt suggests that Biden is currently in the same doldrums as LBJ was in March 1968, when his Gallup rating (the only generally available poll at that time) was 36 percent. Nowadays we have lots of polls, so whereas Biden’s approval is at 38 percent at Gallup and 36 percent at ABC-WaPo, he’s also at 43 percent at IBD/TIPP, 48 percent at Rasmussen, 46 percent at Economist/YouGov, and 44 percent at Fox News. So Hewitt is cherry-picking negative polls to make his shaky case.

More to the point, Biden is being backed by the entire Democratic Party and faces only two nuisance opponents in the 2024 primaries. When LBJ withdrew from the 1968 race, he had already grossly underperformed expectations in an actual New Hampshire primary against U.S. senator Eugene McCarthy and trailed McCarthy in polls in the next primary in Wisconsin (which McCarthy would subsequently win 56-35 right after LBJ’s withdrawal). More importantly, Johnson’s poor showing in New Hampshire (along with a failure to reach a deal with antiwar Democrats on Vietnam policy) had drawn the very formidable U.S. senator Robert F. Kennedy (father of one of today’s nuisance candidates) into the race.

But according to those closest to him, LBJ did not withdraw from the 1968 contest because he was sure to lose his party’s nomination; after all, in those days before ubiquitous primaries, LBJ’s designated successor, Hubert Humphrey, won the nomination without entering a single primary. Johnson called it quits after he decided to announce a major peace initiative (the bombing halt was part of it) in Vietnam and did not want it to be perceived as a mere candidate maneuver. Additionally, LBJ, who nearly died of a heart attack over a decade earlier, had a family history of short life spans and did not feel up to another four years in office, unlike Biden. (Johnson actually died just two days after the next presidential term ended, even without the pressures of the Oval Office.)

Yes, Biden is an aging incumbent Democrat with less than ideal popularity, and you never know what pitfalls his presidency might encounter between now and November 2024. But having decided to run for a second term, there’s no particular reason to think he’ll change his mind, and no reason at all to think his party will push him away from its nomination. So Hugh Hewitt needs a different scenario to imagine in his service to the GOP.

In looking at the dynamics of the debt limit standoff in Washington, it occurred to me that some Republicans may view this not as a risky situation but as a win-win proposition, so I wrote a warning at New York:

In any high-stakes conflict in which combatants have taken diametrically opposed positions, avoiding a destructive outcome depends on equivalent risks and rewards. If failure to reach an agreement is an unmitigated disaster for one side and something less than that for the other, the latter is very likely to win any game of chicken.

The comforting conventional wisdom about the rapidly impending debt-limit collision in Congress is that the House Republicans (and their largely passive Senate GOP allies) precipitating the crisis have as much to lose as the White House and Senate Democrats. If there’s any doubt that Kevin McCarthy will ultimately find some way to avoid a debt default, it’s because the wildly reckless House Freedom Caucus, whose members seem to relish a national or global economic calamity, hold his continuation as Speaker in their hands. So from the point of view of Democrats and allegedly responsible Republicans, the game has been to find some face-saving way for McCarthy to do the right thing, as he surely wants to do, without losing his precious gavel.

But what if the assumption that we’re in a mutually assured destruction scenario is not exactly right? What if McCarthy or the Freedom Caucus or some other strategically positioned group of Republicans is convinced that disaster for the economy and the country could produce an electoral victory for the GOP? If so, that would destroy any incentives for compromise: Republicans will either win important concessions from Joe Biden and his Democrats that would gratify potentially rebellious MAGA types or they’ll inherit a damaged country in November 2024 amid the sort of radically diminished expectations that ease the burden of governing.

One danger sign Democrats should note is public-opinion research indicating that Americans are inclined to apportion blame equally for the debt-limit crisis even though they favor the Democratic position on how to avoid calamity, according to a new ABC/Washington Post survey (a flawed but nonetheless influential poll):

“A 58 percent majority of Americans say the debt limit and federal spending should be handled as separate issues, down from 65 percent who said this in February. A much smaller 26 percent of Americans say Congress should only allow the government to pay its debts if Biden agrees to cut spending, the same share as February….

“The poll finds 39 percent of Americans say they would blame Republicans in Congress if the government goes into default, and 36 percent say they would blame President Biden and 16 percent volunteer that they would blame both equally. (That dynamic is similar to the 2011 debt limit showdown, when 42 percent said they would blame congressional Republicans and 36 percent said they would blame President Obama. Lawmakers averted a default that year.)”

The 2011 analogy is important for both parties. As Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer recalls, the 44th president’s standing going into a reelection year was almost fatally damaged even by a near-miss of a debt default:

“In 2011, [Obama] spent months negotiating with Speaker John Boehner to strike a ‘grand bargain’ that would help solve America’s longstanding fiscal problems. But Mr. Boehner couldn’t deliver his caucus in support of the framework, and the nation hurtled toward default. With only a few days to go, negotiators were able to strike a smaller agreement that satisfied no one, left both sides angry about the result and was damaging for the country. The United States’ credit rating was downgraded for the first time in the nation’s history, and borrowing costs for the government went up.

“Mr. Obama’s approval rating slumped, even dipping below 40 percent in Gallup polling. Our internal polling in the White House showed the president losing re-election handily to a generic Republican.”

Barack Obama managed to claw back much of his popularity and was reelected in 2012, but it was a near thing. Republicans may calculate that an actual debt default, likely followed by a recession, would doom any incumbent president, particularly if voters are inclined to blame that president at least partly for a debt default triggered by the other party.

The abiding truth is that chief executives who preside over a major economic contraction do not often get reelected. This phenomenon dates all the way back to the administration of Martin Van Buren and shortened such recent presidencies as those of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and arguably (though a lot of other things were going on) Donald Trump.

The possibility that at least some Republicans may glimpse a silver lining in a debt default is all the more reason that their buddies on Wall Street (who literally cannot afford to be so sanguine about a market meltdown) should be making it very clear the GOP will never see another campaign contribution if it runs Biden and the U.S. economy right off the road.

When you’ve been following presidential elections as long as I have, you realize that yesterday’s battleground states can become today’s deeply red or blue states. So at New York I wrote up some thoughts about which states may matter most in 2024.

Close presidential elections are a defining feature of our political era. And thanks to the Electoral College system, that means each contest is really waged in a handful of battleground states, which draw the bulk of campaign spending and candidate elbow grease. There is nothing preordained about battleground states’ location or number. The map has already shifted several times in just this century, and several states we think of as battlegrounds today may be noncompetitive in 2024.

A look back at the shifting battlegrounds in recent presidential elections is instructive. Using the most common definition of a battleground state as one decided by less than 5 percent of the vote, the 2000 election had these 12 battleground states: Florida (of course), Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.

In 2004, another close election, there were again 12 battleground states. But Missouri and Tennessee dropped off the list while Colorado and Michigan joined it.

We can skip past the 2008 election, which Barack Obama won by a popular-vote margin of more than 7 percent. Obama’s 2012 reelection victory was much closer; there were only four states decided by less than five points, and only Florida and Ohio were battleground states in both 2004 and 2012. North Carolina and Virginia joined the list of close states.

In 2016, when Trump lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College in a shocker, the battleground map shifted again. The number of closely contested states blossomed from four to 11 with Ohio and Virginia dropping off the list and Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin joining the list.

And finally, in 2020 there were eight battleground states in an election that Joe Biden won by a comfortable margin of the popular vote but a much closer Electoral College margin. Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, and New Hampshire dropped off the battleground list and Georgia joined it.

Florida is the only state that was decided by less than 5 percent of the vote in all five of the elections we’ve examined. Yet if you were going to pick the 2020 battleground state most likely to drop off the list in 2024, it’s probably the rapidly Republican-trending Sunshine State. Perhaps the second-most likely to become less competitive in 2024 is Democratic-trending Michigan. Both of the areas saw statewide sweeps in 2022 by the increasingly ascendant party.

To be clear, ultimately the battleground states are determined by where the presidential campaigns choose to “play” and, more to the point, to spend money. The map is determined not just by the results of the most recent presidential elections but by the number of electoral votes at stake, the relative cost of advertising, and the opportunities to strategically outmaneuver the opposing party (e.g., by forcing the party to expend resources and candidate time where it really would prefer to take a pass). That process has already begun for 2024.

It’s all another reason to pay at least as much attention to state as to national polls, even though the former tend to be less accurate than the latter.

But it’s also important to recognize that there’s a risk of perpetually fighting the last war in focusing on the previous election’s battlegrounds. In living memory, such highly noncompetitive states as California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Texas have been presidential battleground states. The map never stops changing. We may be reminded of that again in 2024 when things don’t go as expected.

Now that Joe Biden has officially announced his reelection bid with nuisance-level opposition, there’s some speculation that the changing Democratic primary calendar could post pitfalls for the president. I discussed that theory at New York:

There is zero reason for Joe Biden to worry about the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, barring some unforeseeable development. Party elites are entirely in his corner. No viable opponents have emerged. And even among rank-and-file Democrats, where Biden’s support has always been a bit mushy, scattered polling shows him far ahead of announced rivals Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (who undoubtedly benefits from positive name ID unassociated with his eccentric recent views) and Marianne Williamson. To put it bluntly, if either of those candidates does become viable as an aspirant for the presidential nomination, the Democratic Party will have become unrecognizable.

That’s not to say, however, that these out-there candidates might not be capable of an embarrassingly strong showing in an isolated contest under very special circumstances. And those circumstances might be early contests in Iowa or New Hampshire, which won’t matter in the final analysis but could get significant media coverage out of sheer force of habit.

Biden himself is barred from competing in Iowa and New Hampshire, which have been the two kickoff states in the presidential nominating process since 1972. That’s because the Democratic National Committee acceded to Biden’s request for a new primary calendar in which South Carolina goes first and Iowa has been ejected from the list of “early states” holding contests prior to March 1. If (and this is still up in the air) Iowa persists with a “first-in-the-nation-caucus,” that will be an unsanctioned event and candidates competing there could lose delegates and even debate access. Whatever happens in Iowa, an unsanctioned primary is all but certain in New Hampshire, where state law requires both parties to hold contests the same day as established by the secretary of State, whose mission is to keep the Granite State first on the primary calendar. But while Biden will stay out of these proscribed contests (it would be a bit absurd for the party’s leader to violate the party’s rules), Kennedy and Williamson, having nothing to lose from sanctions and a lot to gain from a day of headlines, will undoubtedly run hard wherever Biden can’t.

What can Team Biden do to preempt the possibility of an embarrassing early loss to Team WooWoo? In Iowa, with its robust caucus traditions, and where nobody really blames Biden for the state’s loss of status (that became inevitable when the party couldn’t get the votes counted on Caucus Night in 2020), it’s likely caucusgoers pledged either to Biden or to no one will be able to subdue Kennedy or Williamson (and again, Iowa Democrats may just comply with the new calendar, allowing Biden to run there).

New Hampshire’s a bit trickier. Compliance with the new calendar is not an option, and there is some genuine Democratic anger at Biden for dropping the hammer on the Granite State. Still, New Hampshire Democrats don’t want to send an anti-vaxx slate (to cite one possible outcome) to the convention in Chicago, and they’d just as soon not throw their state to the GOP in the general election, either. As nomination-process wizard Josh Putnam notes, New Hampshire Democrats might mount a write-in effort for Biden, but they would be in trouble if it fell short: “If Williamson or Kennedy stand to gain in that scenario, it may not be Biden who loses. It may be New Hampshire that loses even more clout with the national party for 2028.”

Democrats nationally do have a number of months left to persuade the political media to ignore whatever happens in Iowa (if the state goes rogue) and New Hampshire, though there’s no question conservative media will go absolutely wild if Kennedy or Williamson officially wins in an early state, even if Biden’s not on the ballot and no one is campaigning on his behalf. There’s only so much the president’s people can do about how Fox News or the New York Post spin non-news into a big story. Probably the smart thing for them is to threaten local Democrats in any state Biden can’t enter with unending vengeance if they in any way encourage other candidates or lend credence to their empty “wins.”