You’d figure nonwhite candidates for president would be particularly unlikely to descend to old-school racist tactics. In at least one case, you’d figure wrong, as I observed at New York:

The record number of non-white candidates running for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination is a source of pride for Republicans who deny their party has become a MAGA white-nationalist cult. But the candidates themselves often seem to be walking a tightrope when addressing the overwhelmingly white Republican primary electorate. The two South Carolinians in the race are good examples: Black U.S. senator Tim Scott and Indian American former governor Nikki Haley have both touted their ability to overcome racial discrimination as a personal triumph while denying systemic racism is still a problem for the country.

Indian American tech tyro Vivek Ramaswamy hasn’t spent a lot of time talking about the discrimination he might have faced; his whole claim to fame, thanks to lavish attention from Fox News, is being a crusader against “woke corporations” and anything like anti-discrimination policies in the public or private sectors. Predictable as that stance may be, Ramaswamy is now blazing new trails as a non-white candidate peddling racist dog whistles. During an appearance in Iowa over the weekend, his gratuitous attack on Juneteenth as a “useless” holiday that should be replaced with an Election Day holiday drew chuckles and applause from the all-white audience.

Ramaswamy called Juneteenth a “made-up” holiday “imposed under political duress” after the killing of George Floyd.         This actually represented a two-cushion shot to the far-right side of the table. His suggestion that we make Election Day a national holiday was accompanied by proposals to get rid of early and electronic voting and impose a national voter-ID system. I’m pretty sure Ramaswamy is too smart to believe the various forms of convenience voting came out of nowhere in 2020 to thwart Donald Trump. They have been spreading state by state for many decades, often promoted by Republicans. So the premise for his dismissal of Juneteeth comes right out of the MAGA fever swamps..

But the idea of Juneteenth’s arising from nowhere after Floyd’s death is either deeply ignorant or malignantly cynical. Juneteenth commemorations of the last slaves to learn of their emancipation in 1865 date back to 1866; the first state Juneteenth holiday was established in Texas in 1980; and before Joe Biden made it a federal holiday, 49 states had official observances. Ramaswamy’s glib dismissal of Juneteenth as “redundant” is even more insulting. Yes, the emancipation of slaves was the first step in the struggle for justice and equality for which Martin Luther King Jr. died, but both the destruction of slavery and the end of Jim Crow were distinct and momentous occurrences in U.S. history.

As anyone with access to Google can establish, Ramaswamy was singing a different tune about Juneteenth when the holiday was commemorated less than two months ago, when he called it “a celebration of the American Dream itself.”

Even then, Ramaswamy was anxious to make sure no white folks imagined that Juneteenth provided any reason for self-examination or discomfort. But he didn’t call it “useless.” I guess he needed some attention that his vast personal wealth couldn’t buy. Or perhaps he wanted to show Trump, his much-admired role model, that he really was learning the ropes.

In the wake of yet another pro-choice ballot measure victory in Ohio, I offered some thoughts at New York:

During the half-century when Roe v. Wade was law, anti-abortion advocates and their Republican allies frequently complained that the right of “the people” to determine abortion policy had been stolen by the unelected Supreme Court. It became a classic “wedge issue” benefiting the GOP, as frustrated traditionalist Catholics and conservative Evangelical Protestants left the Democratic Party in droves, providing votes and grassroots muscle to the GOP for decades. This legacy culminated in the devil’s bargain that cultural conservatives struck with Donald Trump in 2016.

Well, in the 13 months since the newly reactionary Supreme Court created by Trump reversed Roe and “the people” regained that right (which in reality meant the right to deny other people reproductive rights), voters in red and blue states alike have wherever possible used this freedom to restore the rights the courts and Republican legislators have sought to steal. It happened again on Tuesday in Ohio, the Republican-trending former battleground state where voters decisively rejected a sneaky GOP bid to make it harder to write abortion rights into the state’s constitution through a ballot initiative in November.

This is the seventh statewide abortion-ballot measure since Roe was reversed, and pro-choice forces have won every one of them, even in conservative states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and now Ohio. When Ohio voters (more than likely) enact the constitutional amendment Republicans failed to block, the tally will be 8–0. And in 2024, voters in at least seven other states will decide on measures to protect or deny abortion rights.

If the rout continues, giving “the people” control over abortion policy may be quite the pyrrhic victory for the anti-abortion movement and even more so for the GOP whose electoral fortunes could be caught in the powerful backlash to Roe’s reversal. That backlash is already the prime suspect in the disappointing 2022 midterm results for Republicans who expected a “red wave” that never quite materialized. But the depth and breadth of popular commitment to abortion rights going into what may be an apocalyptic 2024 presidential cycle remains significantly unclear.

It should be understood, however, that the option of using “direct democracy” to restore abortion rights via citizen-initiated constitutional amendments that circumvent Republican legislators (as has now happened in both Michigan and Ohio) is available only in a total of 16 states. Voters may also fight back in cases where GOP lawmakers are trying to abolish state constitutional abortion rights that have been recognized by state courts and need voter ratification of their handiwork (that’s what happened in 2022 in Kansas and Kentucky). But to a significant extent, the fate of the right to choose in many politically contested states will continue to depend on partisan control of major offices, including legislative chambers, governorships, and in some cases elected judges. And that’s aside from the power of Congress to preempt state abortion laws if one party or the other secures a trifecta and can overcome a Senate filibuster. So even in states with no abortion ballot test on tap in 2024, the subject will very much be on the ballot via the two polarized pro-choice and anti-abortion major parties.

The pro-choice state-ballot-measure winning streak, the impact of the subject on key 2022 races, and bountiful polling showing pro-choice majorities in all but the most conservative corners of the country have combined to convince many Republican operatives and even elected officials that the subject is a loser for the GOP. When Donald Trump said just that at the beginning of 2023, it produced a lot of consternation among anti-abortion advocates who had previously adored him for his successfully redeemed promise to appoint justices who would overturn Roe. The Ohio results will convince even more Republicans that the 45th president was right. Perhaps they will even whisper to their abortion-obsessed allies in and beyond religious conservative circles to show some patience, keep their mouths shut, and help the GOP obtain enough power to give their friends what they want when political conditions are more favorable.

But now that Roe is gone, abortion politics is a 24/7 business, and anti-abortion activists are out of patience; that’s particularly true among the newer and more militant organizations like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Students for Life. They are eager to use the competitive Republican presidential-nomination contest to increase, not hide, their leverage over the GOP, and Trump’s candid remarks on abortion politics have encouraged his rivals to pledge greater allegiance to the cause. Mike Pence and Tim Scott have both leapt to embrace the hard-core position of favoring a national six-week abortion ban. Ron DeSantis has punctuated his effort to run to Trump’s right by bragging to Iowans about the six-week ban (deemed “too harsh” by Trump) he signed in Florida.

It’s possible Trump will cruise to the nomination without renewing the vows underlying his marriage of convenience to the anti-abortion movement, and abortion will recede as a 2024 campaign issue. But national Democrats, who know a good wedge issue when they see one, almost certainly won’t let general-election voters who is pledged to protect abortion rights and who has worked hard to abolish them. We don’t have a partisan breakdown of the vote from Ohio (the state does not have voter registration by party), but there were clear indications the “No on Issue 1” coalition included quite a few Republican voters, as did the similar pro-choice coalitions in other states with previous abortion-ballot measures. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has presented county-level data comparing 2020 partisan-vote margins to abortion-ballot measures in Ohio and five other states (California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, and Montana) and the results are striking:

“In Ohio, about one-fifth of counties that voted for Trump in 2020 opposed Issue 1. The same pattern held in the six states included above. Of the 510 counties included in the analysis, only two counties that voted for Biden in 2020 also opposed access to abortion. Among Trump-voting counties, 81 supported that access.

“To use the parlance of political observers, abortion, particularly when presented to voters directly, is an effective wedge issue for the left.”

In a hypothetical Biden-Trump general-election rematch, a significant number of anti-Trump Republicans and Republican-leaning independents will be under pressure to defect to Biden, as a decent number did in 2020. Abandoned pro-choice swing voters of every background will have another reason to conduct their own protest against the GOP, or at least split their tickets.

The prominence of the issue will be enhanced in the media and the minds of voters by conspicuous abortion-rights ballot measures that will face 2024 voters in DeSantis’s Florida, and perhaps in ultra-battleground Arizona. It’s a bad look for today’s allegedly populist, anti-elite GOP to deny people fundamental rights or even the power to determine policies affecting their fundamental rights. Abortion rights could be the populist cause of the next decade or so. That’s a real problem for Republicans.

The clumsiness Ron DeSantis is exhibiting in the 2024 Republican presidential contest is most evident on the fraught cultural issue of abortion, as I explained at New York:

It used to be abortion politics were pretty easy to navigate for GOP pols. Nearly all favored a reversal of Roe v. Wade and demagogued about rare (and usually medically necessary) late-term abortions. Many walked on the wild side and favored fetal “personhood” laws and other total bans that affected not only abortion but contraception; outside the ever-attentive ranks of anti-abortion activists, nobody much cared what these pols advocated. After all, Roe protected pre-viability abortions from sea to shining sea as a matter of federal constitutional law.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe in June of last year, it was a huge victory for the anti-abortion movement and, in theory, for its GOP allies. But it has created new and difficult choices for Republican politicians, notably RDS.

When SCOTUS was deliberating over what would became the fatal opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, based on a challenge from Mississippi, the Republican-controlled legislature in Florida enacted, and DeSantis signed, a copycat law, banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Nobody knew for sure at that point exactly what SCOTUS would do; the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion was a few weeks away. But DeSantis associated himself with a cruel (and unpopular) approach with no exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

Post-Dobbs, as DeSantis prepared to run for president, the Florida law, obnoxious as it was, became conspicuously modest as compared to the total and near-total bans being enacted by Republicans in other southern states. But at the same time, the backlash to the abolition of abortion rights grew intense almost everywhere, playing a big role in the underwhelming GOP performance in the 2022 midterms. So DeSantis characteristically played it both ways: He welcomed a six-week ban, but he signed it in the dead of night, and for a good while (even at the Christian right bastion of Liberty University) wouldn’t talk about it.

That changed when the DeSantis presidential campaign became focused on Iowa and its extremely powerful conservative Evangelical–anti-abortion constituency, whose leaders were offended by Donald Trump’s public remarks describing abortion as a loser of an issue, even as he refused to back any particular post-Dobbs abortion laws. Meanwhile, influential Iowa governor Kim Reynolds signed her own six-week ban (which is currently held up in the courts), and it began to look like DeSantis had gotten it right, at least for the GOP primaries.

But no, as Politico reported this week:

“The nation’s leading anti-abortion group on Monday called Gov. Ron DeSantis’ failure to support federal abortion restrictions ‘unacceptable’ — a blow for the Florida Republican, who has passed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country.

“Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America was responding to DeSantis’ recent interview with conservative commentator Megyn Kelly, in which the governor said abortion policy would be best decided by the states.”

Like several other Republican presidential candidates (notably Trump and Nikki Haley), DeSantis had for months bobbed and weaved and avoided taking a firm position on the prospect of a federal abortion ban that would override state laws, even though the more strident anti-abortion groups like SBA had made a 15-week national ban a litmus test for those seeking their support. But Kelly pinned him down, and DeSantis decided alarming blue-state Americans by threatening state-protected abortion rights wouldn’t be terribly prudent, all the more because the Senate filibuster makes a federal abortion ban inconceivable in the immediate future, as he pointed out.

The SBA group’s president Marjorie Dannenfelser wasn’t having any of it, Politico noted:

“‘Gov. DeSantis’s dismissal of this task is unacceptable to pro-life voters,’ Dannenfelser said. ‘A consensus is already formed. Intensity for it is palpable and measurable. There are many pressing legislative issues for which Congress does not have the votes at the moment, but that is not a reason for a strong leader to back away from the fight.’”

Mike Pence and Tim Scott have signed onto the national ban, leaving DeSantis in a conspicuous spotlight as the advocate of an extremist position on abortion who’s under attack for not wanting to impose his extremist position on all 50 states, at least right away. He’s probably lost any advantage over Trump (already beloved of the anti-abortion movement because he kept his promise to get Roe reversed) on the abortion policy that he might have held or imagined. But the candidate who keeps pledging to make America a jumbo-size replica of Florida cannot run away from the fact that his own state’s citizens are being denied reproductive rights altogether.

The political impact of the new felony criminal indictment of Donald Trump could be both massive and complicated. But one thing it will do for sure is keep the 2020 election in view, as I noted at New York:

It’s easy to conflate all of Donald Trump’s legal problems into an undifferentiated blur of litigation serving as a sideshow to his 2024 comeback effort. But it’s important to recognize that the latest indictment from special counsel Jack Smith won’t just serve as a distraction for Trump and other candidates running for president. It will inevitably focus the intraparty and interparty debate already underway on the events of the last presidential election, a dynamic that will only intensify once the expected indictment of Trump under Georgia state law for election interference activities drops in Atlanta any day now.

It is almost impossible to overstate how much this development plays into Trump’s reelection strategy. From the get-go, the 45th president has made his 2024 campaign a vengeance-and-redemption tour based on his contention that Democrats “rigged” the 2020 election and subsequently conspired to waylay his career with an impeachment, the January 6 committee investigation, and multiple civil and criminal proceedings. In various ways, other Republican candidates and opinion leaders have sought to convince their voters to “move on” to a campaign based on negative characterizations of Joe Biden, his “far left” party, his economic and fiscal record, and his age and alleged disabilities.

But now there’s no “moving on” from the events of 2020 in all their wildly improbable trajectory culminating in the January 6 Capitol riot. The pathetic reaction of top Trump rival Ron DeSantis to the latest indictment — basically offering to save Trump’s freedom by wrecking the federal law enforcement system — shows how everyone other than the former president has lost control of the 2024 narrative. The sheer weight of Trump’s upcoming trials on the nomination-contest calendar will force his rivals to adjust the pace and direction of their campaign activities as well, even as they chase the man dominating the political landscape from a great distance.

That’s true, in a different sort of way, for Biden and other Democrats. The new indictment (which, again, will be echoed by the impending Georgia indictment) doesn’t involve some arcane matter like presidential records or some prepresidential or non-presidential Trump misconduct. It focuses on events virtually all Americans read and watched and heard about in great detail as they unfolded. Given the lens of partisan polarization through which the prosecution will be viewed, Team Biden will need to make a persuasive case to a narrow band of swing voters that Trump is the villain of the story and a criminal who must be kept from regaining power lest his crimes bear fruit. And if Trump is indeed the GOP nominee and the general election is as close as it appears to be right now, then Democrats will without question make their crucial voter mobilization efforts turn on characterizations of Trump and his cronies and allies as threats to democracy and the rule of law.

All roads lead right back to the crucial days between the wee hours of November 4, 2020, when Trump falsely declared victory, and January 6, 2021, when his election coup finally failed.

This is the ground on which Trump has always wanted to wage his 2024 election battle, from the day last fall when he announced his comeback bid as an effort to resume his interrupted presidency. If he loses this election or his freedom, it will be entirely his own doing.

Like most Democrats, I’m annoyed by Republican pols who brag they will kick our butts in a general election. I’m glad to report the most annoying braggart of them all, Ron DeSantis, has been getting his comeuppance, as I noted at New York:

As Ron DeSantis tries to catch up to Republican presidential primary front-runner Donald Trump, the Florida governor’s campaign has been making aggressive assertions that he has an advantage in terms of his “electability” against Joe Biden. The case for DeSantis being the better Republican general-election candidate has had less to do with any direct evidence than with the fading memories of his strong reelection performance in 2022, compared to the mixed results of Trump-endorsed midterms candidates and, of course, his loss to Biden in 2020.

But truth be told, a lot of DeSantis’s electability claims are more about Republican voters’ presumed lack of trust in Trump, which isn’t all that well established. In fact, a new Monmouth survey of Republicans shows Trump has an electability advantage over DeSantis. It’s not even very close. If you directly ask Republicans which candidate is stronger against Biden, Trump wins pretty clearly:

“Regardless of whether you currently support Donald Trump, which of the following statements comes closest to your view about which Republican has the best chance to win in 2024.”

Forty-five percent said Trump was definitely stronger and another 24 percent said Trump was probably stronger. Only 13 percent said any other Republican is definitely stronger, and 18 percent said some other Republican is probably stronger. Directly comparing Trump and DeSantis, 47 percent said the Florida governor was weaker than the former president; 22 percent said he was stronger.

It’s not just Monmouth showing DeSantis’s loss of an electability advantage (if he ever had one). As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake notes, this problem shows up in early state polls as well:

“Fox Business polls in the key primary states of Iowa and South Carolina tell the same tale.

“In Iowa, 45 percent said Trump would be the most likely to defeat Biden, while 23 percent picked DeSantis. And in South Carolina, Trump’s edge on this measure was threefold: 51 percent to 17 percent.”

In recent weeks, DeSantis has deemphasized the argument that he’s more appealing to swing voters and instead focused on out-Trumping Trump by running to his right on immigration, crime, COVID-19, and federal spending. It’s possible he’s abandoning his once-obsessive electability pitch altogether and is going after hard-core “very conservative” and/or ultra-MAGA voters. Some right-wing Republicans believe, improbably, that swing voters actually want stridently ideological candidates rather than any sort of squishy centrists. And in the end, a candidate can’t win the general election at all without winning the nomination. More likely, Team DeSantis is going after today’s Trump voters by abandoning anything like moderation and perhaps making electability an afterthought. It’s a good way to make yourself unelectable altogether.

As a political history fanatic, I quickly read and then wrote about this history-based insight on 2024 at New York:

There isn’t much question that the likeliest scenario for the 2024 presidential election will be a rematch between 2020 winner Joe Biden and 2020 loser Donald Trump. Allegedly, this is a pairing most Americans don’t want (it’s actually a bit hard to tell since Democrats nearly all despise Trump and Republicans nearly all despise Biden, meaning a “rematch” begins by displeasing half of the electorate). But the polls show Biden crushing Robert Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson in the primary and Trump far ahead of 12 intraparty opponents, so anything other than a rematch would be quite a surprise.

But Biden vs. Trump: Part II will not simply be a replay of the 2020 election. Most obviously, conditions in the country have changed with the winding down of the COVID-19 pandemic and the winding up of the economy, along with renewed Russian aggression against Ukraine and all the partisan controversies that have accompanied this latest phase of divided U.S. government.

Perhaps most important, there will be a new incumbent president on the ballot in 2024. But as Jonathan V. Last observes, Biden won’t be the only president on the ballot if Trump wins the GOP nomination:

“No one living has seen an election in which two presidents have run against one another.

“And that changes everything …

“One of the (many) advantages an incumbent president has is that he has proven that he can do the job.

“This sword has two edges: An incumbent’s presidential record can be attacked. Some voters may like it. Some may not. But at the lizard-brain level, they have all seen him sitting at the big desk in the Oval. They know what he looks like as president.

“At the risk of stating the obvious: Joe Biden is president of the United States. Donald Trump used to be president of the United States.”

So in a Biden-Trump rematch, both candidates will have already passed the plausible-president threshold, and both have a recent presidential record to defend. As Last points out, this hasn’t happened since 1892, when former president Grover Cleveland faced incumbent president Benjamin Harrison, who had narrowly defeated Cleveland (while losing the popular vote) four years earlier. Then as now, the rematches came in an extended period of closely contested presidential elections. Then as now, the electorate knew both candidates very well.

But there are some big differences between the 19th-century and 21st-century rematches. For one thing, Harrison’s 1892 defeat was preceded by a financial panic and recession that cost his Republican Party an incredible 93 House seats (out of a total of 332) in the 1890 midterms. The 2022 midterms, by contrast, were a near dead heat with modest Republican gains in the House. But the even bigger difference is that the Cleveland-Harrison transition in 1889 was peaceful. The 2021 transition was perpetually contested by the loser and eventually by a mob that invaded Congress and tried to stop the final certification of the winner. Indeed, those events are an important — to many voters, a central — part of Trump’s record as an incumbent.

The horrific culmination of the first Biden-Trump election has frozen the vast majority of partisans in place as a rematch approaches, with most Democrats regarding Trump as a lawless rogue who had to be impeached twice, and most Republicans regarding Biden as a usurper who stole the White House from its rightful occupant. Conversely, most Republicans view the Trump administration as an era of peace and prosperity, while most Democrats view the Biden administration as a return to normalcy and constitutional governance. It’s unclear how many voters will engage in any judicious comparison of the records of the two presidents, and it’s entirely possible the result will be determined by voters who must decide which of them they dislike the least.

But beware of anyone telling you there is some infallible historical precedent governing a 2024 rematch. As has been so often the case since Trump won the 2016 election in an upset that overturned previous infallible historical precedents, we’re in unexplored political territory.

Sometimes you just have to cringe at the excuses politicians make for their troubles. As I noted at New York, Ron DeSantis has resorted to the hoariest of them all.

It’s never a great look when a politician hits a rough patch and blames it on the news media. But rather than blaming Donald Trump for his recent 2024 campaign troubles — or even taking some responsibility for his bungled start — Florida governor Ron DeSantis keeps making the cringeworthy claim that his campaign is actually going gangbusters but is being artificially downgraded by liberal scribes who fear him.

“I think it’s pretty clear that the media does not want me to be their candidate,” DeSantis recently told Fox News when asked how he plans to overcome Trump’s lead. “They’ve tried to create a narrative that somehow the race is over.”

Let’s say he was just talking about the liberal mainstream media, that great nemesis for all conservative politicians. Is it true that they (we?) fear DeSantis as the GOP nominee and are thus developing a “narrative” that “somehow the race is over,” presumably to head off the awful specter of a DeSantis-Biden general election? You can see why that’s a story Team DeSantis would relish since it both implies the candidate’s problems are imaginary and encourages Republican primary voters to support their enemies’ enemy.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

For one thing, reporting that the DeSantis campaign is encountering problems doesn’t mean writing him off (as a matter of fact, I just wrote a piece the other day arguing it was far too early for that). But the candidate has some basic weaknesses that have been evident for some time.

As my colleague Jonathan Chait observed back in April, DeSantis is potentially a very vulnerable general-election candidate:

“He has gone on the record in the past supporting both privatization and benefit cuts for Social Security and Medicare, a position so deeply toxic that even most Republican voters recoil from it. More recently, he signed a ban on abortion after six weeks, a period so restrictive it virtually amounts to a complete ban …

“Yes, DeSantis would be able to regain some of the orthodox Republican voters repelled by Trump’s personal style. But he would forfeit not only some of the Trump cultists whose only connection to Republican politicians is a personal attachment to the 45th president but also some of the working-class voters Trump attracted by discarding some of his party’s unpopular issue baggage.”

Since April, DeSantis has doubled down on trying to run to Trump’s right. He has gone hog wild not only with an abortion stance that may be kryptonite to his swing-voter appeal but on positions like his hostility to COVID-19 measures (including vaccines) and his demands for militarization of the southern border, which may appeal to the GOP base at the cost of alienating the general electorate. If he keeps pursuing this strategy while chasing Trump from far behind, you have to figure that by the time the deal goes down in 2024, the DeSantis who won an easy reelection in Florida in 2022 may be all but unrecognizable to those who voted for him mostly because the state’s economy was doing well.

But you don’t just have to speculate about how offensive a crazed MAGA monster out-Trumping Trump may be to swing voters down the road. You can look at polls right now and see the evidence that DeSantis has no actual general-election advantage over Trump despite his team’s constant assertions that he is more electable. According to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, trial heats show Trump trailing Joe Biden by 0.2 percent (43.8 percent to 43.6 percent). DeSantis trails Biden by 1.5 percent. It’s not a meaningful difference, but it does show that the breezy self-confidence with which many DeSantis boosters assume he’s Democrats’ biggest nightmare is based on supposition, if not superstition.

Perhaps DeSantis backers would argue that the governor isn’t kicking Biden’s ass just yet because his sterling virtues aren’t as well known as they will be after he runs a couple of hundred million dollars worth of ads. But a look at DeSantis’s favorability ratio (better than Trump’s or Biden’s but still underwater) suggests that may not be true either. His RCP polling averages are currently at 37.9 percent favorable and 45.2 percent unfavorable. So to know him is not necessarily to love him; more exposure as the 2024 race heats up may not improve his standing against Biden.

None of this data, of course, factor in the signs that are actually the source of recent negative media stories: DeSantis, for all his money and the incessant boasting of his campaign and super-PAC staffs, isn’t running a particularly tight operation.

It’s a separate question, of course, as to whether Democrats would prefer dealing with an actually inaugurated Trump or DeSantis. No one knows exactly how either man would conduct himself in the Oval Office, and a lot would depend on what happens downballot as well. But to the extent that DeSantis’s route to the nomination involves capturing the heart of Trump’s base of support, the odds are very high that by the time Republicans (likely) nominate one of them, their differences would be less significant than ever before. As Chait put it:

“The best option for any liberal, moderate, or believer in democracy is to keep the Republicans away from power until they become sane again. In the meantime, the party has nothing to offer but different kinds of bad choices.”

So no, liberal media aren’t lashing out at DeSantis because he strikes them as a world-beater. Right now, DeSantis’s objective standing in the 2024 contest doesn’t require any negative spin.

Now that we have something more accurate than exit polls for examining the 2022 midterms, it’s time for a reconsideration of that election’s implications, as I noted at New York:

National elections are complicated phenomena. You can determine the results and their immediate consequences soon enough. But the internal dynamics of the electorate and the implications for future elections can take a while to grasp. At first, all you have are imperfect exit polls and pundit insights, and they sometimes produce equally imperfect conventional wisdom.

That’s what happened in the 2022 midterms. We know that Republicans managed narrowly to flip the U.S. House but fell short of expectations in that chamber, as well as in the U.S. Senate and to some extent state contests. There was a lot of talk about Democrats benefiting from highly motivated pro-choice voters upset about the reversal of Roe v. Wade, and Republicans suffering from extremist Senate candidates promoted by Donald Trump. Now we’re getting a clearer picture thanks to the Pew Research Center’s careful analysis of validated voters (those saying they voted and for whom Pew found voter files) from the midterms:

“In midterm elections that yielded mixed results for both parties, Republicans won the popular vote for the U.S. House of Representatives largely on the strength of higher turnout.

“A new Pew Research Center analysis of verified voters and nonvoters in 2022, 2020, 2018 and 2016 finds that partisan differences in turnout — rather than vote switching between parties — account for most of the Republican gains in voting for the House last year.”

So while Democratic turnout may have exceeded expectations, it didn’t exceed Republican turnout. And voters who did turn out overwhelmingly stayed with their own party:

“Overall, 68% of those who voted in the 2020 presidential election turned out to vote in the 2022 midterms. Former President Donald Trump’s voters turned out at a higher rate in 2022 (71%) than did President Joe Biden’s voters (67%) …

“Relatively small shares of voters defected from their partisan affiliation or 2020 presidential vote. Among those who voted for both president in 2020 and for a House representative in 2022, just 6% crossed party lines between elections or voted for third-party candidates in either election.”

Viewed in total isolation, this might be viewed as good news for Republicans going forward; that was how the New York Times interpreted the Pew numbers:

“The report serves as a warning sign for Democrats ahead of the 2024 presidential election, with early polls pointing toward a possible rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.

“Though Democrats maintained control of the Senate, all but one of their governor’s mansions and only narrowly lost the House, the Pew data shows that a larger percentage of voters who supported Mr. Trump in 2020 cast ballots in November than those who backed Mr. Biden did. People who had voted in past elections but sat out 2022 were overwhelmingly Democrats.”

But the midterm results and the Pew data on who voted and for whom should emphatically not be viewed in isolation from historic trends. There were two data points supporting the expectation that a “red wave” would form in November 2022. The first was the “midterm falloff” typically experienced by Democratic-leaning voter groups, particularly young and minority voters who have never participated in non-presidential elections in numbers matching the older and whiter voters who now lean Republican. The second is that traditional midterm voter backlash almost always afflicts the party that controls the White House. What the Pew analysis shows us is that the first phenomenon (a Democratic turnout falloff) indeed occurred, but the second (significant vote-switching away from Joe Biden’s party) largely didn’t. As so you had a small Republican ripple instead of a wave.

The other side of the “midterm falloff” coin is that turnout by pro-Democratic voting groups tends to improve in presidential elections. All else being equal, that means if Democrats can again hang onto their voters and they turn out at a higher rate, they should have an advantage in 2024. To put it another way, they should have lost significant ground between 2020 and 2022 but didn’t. The fact that Democrats didn’t do as well as they did in 2018, which the Times analysis emphasized, is extremely unsurprising: Republicans controlled the White House then, and Democrats did produce some vote-switching in their favor.

The exceptional party loyalty exhibited by 2022 voters found by Pew, it should be mentioned, refutes some of the impressions of unusual voter trends that pundits discerned right after the elections, some of them derived from iffy exit-poll findings. The exits showed Democrats carrying women by a robust eight-point margin (53 percent to 45 percent), which reinforced the belief the abortion issue changed the results significantly. The validated voter data showed Democrats carrying women by a more modest three-point margin (51 percent to 48 percent). On the other side of the ledger, exit polls showed Republicans winning 13 percent of the Black vote, more than double the percentage the GOP won in 2018. But Pew’s validated voter data showed Republicans winning just 5 percent of the Black vote, a point less than they won in 2018.

To be very clear, the Democratic advantage in 2024 that I’ve inferred from the Pew data is what would happen if only turnout patterns change in that election. Everything — from conditions in the country, issue salience, and the quality of candidates and campaigns — may not stay the same, which could mean a narrow GOP victory or the first comfortable win for Democrats (or for either party) since 2008. But there’s a reason Democrats were thrilled to come out of the midterms without bigger losses than they sustained, and there’s no reason to assume their position will become more tenuous in a presidential year.

We now have a starting point for the 2024 presidential nominating contest, and the date seems to have been something of an accident, as I observed at New York:

It’s official: Republicans’ first-in-the nation Iowa Caucus is set for January 15, 2024. That means the voting phase of the 2023 Republican presidential-nomination contest will begin in about six months, on a federal holiday.

Iowa Republicans have given themselves an unnecessary headache by scheduling their caucus to coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. Day. State chairman Jeff Kaufmann claims they did this without “considering it.” Now Kaufmann is trying to spin the miscalculation as a “tribute” to MLK, but it won’t be a good look for the famously non-diverse Republicans of Iowa to be engaged in full-time presidential politicking when others are reflecting on King’s provocative and progressive legacy. The burden of defending that decision will likely fall, ironically, on the two Black presidential candidates competing in Iowa, Tim Scott and Larry Elder.

While the specific date of the Iowa Caucus had been up in the air until now, the GOP calendar was expected to start early in 2023 owing to some failed efforts by other states to displace Iowa and New Hampshire. Some of this maneuvering was encouraged by the Democratic National Committee, which felt freer to tamper with the calendar as its 2024 contest isn’t competitive. The big development for Republicans was the Nevada legislature’s vote to create a February 6 presidential primary, which led New Hampshire’s secretary of state to move its primary to January 23. Iowa’s decision maintains the traditional eight-day gap between Iowa and New Hampshire. South Carolina Republicans (who do not have to vote on the same day as Democrats) will round out the early states with a primary on February 24. Then other states are free to hold primaries or caucuses beginning in March.

So we are once again virtually guaranteed a snowy-evening launching point for the 2024 presidential primary calendar. Iowa Republicans have a significantly simpler caucus process than the opposition; Democrats’ convoluted if time-honored system of affinity groups, delegate-equivalents, and multiple votes crashed the Democratic caucuses in 2020, contributing to the DNC’s decision to take away the state’s first-in-the-nation status and ban presidential caucuses altogether. Republicans just show up, hear some speeches, eat a few cookies and vote for their presidential favorite in a straight balloting that’s easy to tabulate. Perhaps with the excess time a moment to commemorate a conservative take on the MLK legacy will be obligatory in 2024.

Meanwhile, Iowa Democrats will likely have caucus meetings on January 15. But in deference to the DNC’s wishes, they are not inclined to complete or announce any votes on presidential preferences or the allocation of any delegates on the traditional caucus night. It appears they will have a separate vote-by-mail process for their real decisions, which will be announced when the initial phases of the presidential-nominating contest are safely past. So Joe Biden will not have to compete in rogue Iowa caucuses, and if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Marianne Williamson happen to show any strength in Iowa, we likely won’t know about it until Biden has romped to victory in sanctioned primaries.

All the national attention, then, will be on the Republicans engaged in an individual struggle for survival and a collective effort to keep keep current front-runner Donald Trump from wrapping up the 2024 nomination before the first warm weather of spring arrives.

As someone who wrote intensively about Donald Trump’s attempted election coup in 2020, I’ve been on the alert for a recurrence in 2024. And as I noted at New York, we’re not at all out of the woods yet.

Lest anyone forget: The front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is a man who has never accepted his 2020 defeat. More importantly, Donald Trump has convinced a sizable majority of GOP voters to accept his unsubstantiated claims that the presidency was “stolen” from him in 2020. It follows, then, that if Trump loses again in November 2024, he is very likely to deny defeat once again. But his options for challenging the legitimacy of the next presidential race are increasingly limited.

Looking back at the attempted election coup that culminated in the violence of January 6, it’s obvious that Trump’s long-range strategy was to allege widespread Democratic voter fraud based on disputing the legitimacy of voting by mail and in-person early voting, while seizing on and publicizing every available rumor of chicanery by Democratic election officials. This gambit arguably started way back in the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory, when he insisted on claiming he had won the national popular vote that he actually lost to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million votes. It reached a crescendo on Election Night 2020 when Trump claimed victory based on partial returns before mail ballots could be counted.

While Trump has never abandoned his effort to delegitimize non–Election Day voting, he (along with other leading Republicans) is now urging GOP voters to fully take advantage of the voting rules as they exist across the country. And that’s largely what they did in the 2022 midterms; clearly, the partisan “taint” of early voting has worn off. That means there will likely be no basis in 2024 for a “red mirage” phenomenon, in which the Republican candidate will take a momentary lead based on a disproportionate share of the votes that happen to be counted first. If the election is close, Trump would have to wait just like the rest of the country for all the votes to roll in. And unless he reverses course once again, his “stolen election” claims will need a different rationale than the illegitimacy of early voting. What will replace it? That’s unclear.

The three tactics Team Trump pursued in 2020 in an effort to negate Joe Biden’s win probably won’t be available in 2024. Those were (1) the effort to supplant state-certified presidential electors in key states via the unilateral action of Republican-controlled state legislatures, based on an exotic constitutional theory called the “independent state legislatures doctrine;” (2) appeals to Republican election officials in key states to put a thumb on the scales to reverse the outcome (e.g., the infamous Trump phone call to Georgia secretary of State Brad Raffensperger), and (3) the culminating bid on January 6 to stop or reverse Biden’s final certification in Congress, which was the object of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a Trump-inspired mob.

As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent recently pointed out, all three of these avenues for flipping an election have been at least partially blocked since January 6:

“The Supreme Court’s decision in Moore v. Harper on Tuesday is a major reprieve for American democracy. By rejecting the radical idea that state legislatures have quasi-unlimited power to determine how elections are run, the court made it harder for lawmakers to engage in the shenanigans that Donald Trump encouraged to overturn his 2020 reelection loss …

“Along with the ruling, virtually all election-denying candidates for governor and secretary of state in key swing states lost in the 2022 midterms. [And] Congress reformed the law that governs how presidential electors are counted.”

Aside from the Supreme Court’s rejection of the “independent state legislatures” doctrine, Republicans lost control of legislatures in Michigan and (at least temporarily) Pennsylvania. And beyond the reforms of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 that make it much harder to challenge presidential-election results in Congress, the vice-president who will preside over the tabulation of electoral votes in January of 2025 is Kamala Harris.

So the loopholes Trump tried to exploit in 2020 to give his insurrection some legitimacy just won’t be available in 2024. Sure, the sort of state-by-state guerrilla litigation based on rumors and conspiracy theories that made laughingstocks of Trump’s legal team in 2020 will theoretically still be available. But it’s no more likely to succeed than it did before.

Is Greg Sargent correct, then, in arguing that “our democratic system is fortifying itself on multiple levels, unexpectedly reducing the odds of a rerun of Trump’s efforts in 2024”? Let’s hope so. But it’s also possible that in the absence of legal fig leaves for insurrectionary measures, Team Trump will resort to an overtly revolutionary approach, including summoning a mob to the Capitol, this time not to interfere with Congress’s proceedings but to suppress them altogether.

Without question, a host of institutions, including the Biden administration, the federal courts, responsible Republicans (such as they are), and the U.S. military leadership would stand in the way of a outright insurrectionary bid to reverse a presidential election result and impose an authoritarian regime. It probably won’t happen. But it shouldn’t be ruled out as a strategic option for this lawless man and his devoted following. Trump has, after all, openly and repeatedly described the existing U.S. government as an inherently evil and corrupt “swamp” whose inhabitants in both major parties are hell-bent on the destruction of the country and its values. It’s a bedrock principle among MAGA enthusiasts that they enjoy a right of violent revolution (the entire basis, they claim, for the Second Amendment) against “tyranny” as they define it. And Trump represents a lot of people living in a sort of cultural — and even religious — panic motivated by the demographic and geopolitical decline of the “great” America they imagine.

It’s good that Trump has been hemmed in institutionally since January 6 and may be forced to accept an adverse 2024 result even if he won’t admit he lost. The best way to ensure that happens is for voters to rebuke him by a margin that is simply unmistakable, convincing his GOP co-conspirators once and for all that he and his movement represent a losing proposition. But at the same time, we should take the 45th president’s regular revolutionary mutterings seriously if not literally.