The Real Issue In The 2024 Election Is The 2020 Election

Let's face it, the whole New York hush money trial has been a distraction. Each day has new breathless headlines: will there be a hung jury? will Trump testify? what if Trump is convicted? what will Judge Merchan do next?

None of this matters. If there's a hung jury, Trump's progress will continue. If he's convicted, the pattern up to now has been the one since last fall: every time he's lost in a New York courtroom, his poll numbers go up. If he's jailed, I suspect his sons and other surrogates will campaign on his behalf, and his poll numbers will go up even more -- except I think even his opponents recognize this would be a disastrous outcome for them.

This view from the far left actually outlines the real issue with surprising insight:

[A] sizable number of voters either don’t remember or misremember the four turbulent years of the Trump administration. But paradoxically, educating voters about the potential consequences of a Biden defeat could annoy and alienate them by pushing Trump fatigue to new heights.

. . . A host of data shows that a crucial slice of the electorate has relatively sunny memories of the Trump years and a vague understanding of the extremist agenda his allies are putting together for a second term.

. . . The basic idea is to change perceptions of Trump the amusing and irreverent outsider to Trump the salesman for deeply unpopular policies and practices.

. . . But in an election Biden can win only by making it about his opponent, he’s lucky that in Trump he faces a challenger who is so eager to become the center of attention and offers daily evidence that he won’t go away gracefully.

But isn't the whole subtext here that right now, the big issue in the election is actually Joe Biden? The writer acknowledges that the electorate "misremembers" the Trump years as being sunny, but the inevitable follow-up is that they've concluded the wrong guy got elected in 2020, which is another way of saying the election was "stolen". So the strategy he's proposing is that the electorate should be told that Trump is really an awful guy, even worse than Biden.

This is the playbook James Comey is following in the MSNBC interview Tuesday night:

I don’t care how you feel about Joe Biden, you must vote for him because the consequences on the other side are too severe.

Those conmsequences being, as Comey lays out,

serious for the Justice Department and the FBI, because Trump is coming for those institutions. He knows their power. And I think he has regrets that he didn’t work hard enough to corrupt them last time. So he’s coming for them.

But the problem, as the electorate is beginning to see it, is that the deep state, not just the FBI and the DOJ, but the intelligence community, which unanimously declared Hunter's laptop to be Russian disinformation during the 2020 campaign, and even the National Institutes of Health, which foisted the COVID fraud on the public with lockdowns, masks, vaccines, and social distancing, all worked together to steal the election.

I cited an academic study yesterday that claimed that if the COVID death rate were 5% less, Trump would have won three of the swing states he lost in 2020, giving him an electoral college majority -- but it's generally recognized that the COVID statistics were heavily manipulated. If someone died in a motorcycle accident, for instance, he was counted as a COVID death if he happened to test positive.

This is why the various show trials, the New York civil cases, the New York hush money case, the Fulton County case, and the federal indictments, resonate with the electorate -- and they do; Trump's rise in the polls began in September-October 2023, corresponding with the start of his New York civil fraud trial under Judge Engoron. Trump has claimed on a near-daily basis since then that these cases are "election interference", and this is essentially an extension of the claim that the 2020 election was "stolen".

So far, the proposed counter-strategy from the Democrats, to convince the electorate that Trump is worse -- he'll ban abortion, say, or he'll disband the FBI -- isn't working. The main difficulty is that although the Democrats were able to hide Biden's worst shortcomings in 2020 by using COVID as an excuse, since he's been president, some level of public exposure is unavoidable, and in recent months, he almost never appears without some level of slurring, malapropisms, gaffes, and confusion. The electorate has factored in that this was largely hidden in 2020, which furthers the impression that there was something not legitimate in that election.

So what's the Democrat alternative? Incressingly, the calls are for Joe to drop out.

If the polls still look this bad in early August, after a big debate and tens of millions more in spending, Biden must make a big decision.

. . . even Biden will have to explain why an historically unpopular president is losing to a historically unpopular opponent.

. . . The Biden campaign understandably wants to project the idea that this race isn’t over. If it can’t remove by early August the suspicion that it is, it could be that the real race hasn’t even begun.

But the pieces that try to game out any such scenario all have the air of fantasy. None mentions Vice President Harris as the single likeliest successor to Joe if he does drop out; they all do, however, list the usual Plan C suspects, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, and astonishingly, J B Pritzker or Josh Shapiro -- neglecting to consider the far-left wing of Democrats will never tolerate a Jewish nominee. This is a measure of the dream world these pundits inhabit.

But another aspect of this wishful thinking is the almost certain response of the electorate should Joe drop out in August and be replaced with anyone -- the public will see it as simply one final, desperate attempt to steal the election. An attempt to portray, for instance, Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer (with Pritzker and Shapiro ruled out) as a "normal" candidate who will restore decency in the face of "extremist" Donald Trump would be seen as cynical and yet another attempt to steal an election with a sudden do-over when the orignal candidate doesn't work.

The issue that won't go away, barring some miracle, is the 2020 election. That's what the 2024 election is really about.