So, yesterday I got my first snail-mail letter from Joe since he announced his 2024 campaign, and it should come as no surprise that the letter asked me to send in more dough.
After I wrote my check, I took the time to read the letter Joe sent to me and everyone else who heard from him on the first day of his 2024 campaign.
And what did the letter say? It said that Joe isn’t running a campaign against the GOP. He’s running against the MAGA GOP. If that’s not a brilliant way for Joe to define his campaign, I don’t know what could be better.
Ever hear of the Whig Party? They weren’t some one-shot deal like the way that Ross Perot ran in 1992 or Ralph Nader screwed things up for Al Gore in 2000. The Whig Party elected a President, William Henry Harrison, in 1840, also elected 29 members to the Senate and 142 House members that same year. In 1846, they elected 21 Senate members and sent 116 members to the House.
Know what happened in 1858? The Whig Party collapsed and disappeared due to ideological, inter-party conflicts about slavery that presaged the Civil War.
Now it’s true that the current Republican Party has been around longer than the Whig Party was around. But it’s also true that the GOP hasn’t faced a challenge like the challenge posed by Donald Trump and the MAGA contingent, who have been around since 2016 and don’t seem as yet to be withering away.
But more to the point is the fact that, if anything, Joe, and the Democrats will do whatever they can do to keep MAGA alive. Because if nothing else, MAGA is and will always be linked to January 6th, and other than crazies like Marjorie Taylor Greene, I don’t see anyone in the public sphere defending those schmucks.
On the other hand, as long as Trump remains a serious Presidential candidate for the GOP, and right now there doesn’t seem to be any other serious Republican candidate out there, never mind any other candidate serious or not, MAGA remains a specter that will always be present in every discussion about the 2024 Presidential race. Which, by definition, gives Joe an immediate edge.
In the last six Presidential elections, the two major parties have split 763,166,908 votes, of which the Democrats have received 392,579,669 votes and the GOP has received 370,587,239 votes, meaning that the Democratic Party has racked up 51.4% of the total votes cast for the two major parties since the election of 2000, but the Democrats have secured a majority of the popular votes in 5 of those 6 contests.
Now given how we elect the President through the Electoral College and given that every state gets two Senate members even if here are more cows than people in states like Montana and Wyoming, what the popular totals demonstrate is that at least in the twenty-first century, this country tilts towards the Left.
The problem for the Dems, however, is that cultural and racial diversity is more pronounced in blue states, particularly ‘entry’ states like NY and CA, but when you get into the red-state regions, these states, racially speaking, are still mostly white.
On the other hand, the Dems don’t need to worry about votes in the less-populated southern or western states, they need to focus on the handful of ‘swing’ states whose vote totals will determine how the Electoral College comes out. And these states, like PA, WI, and MI, are states with populations that are increasingly racially and ethnically diverse.
Take a look at this map which shows how diverse the population is in all 50 states:
Notice that the states which are still mostly white and least diverse are all red states. These states each send two members to the Senate, but they can only control the House and the White House if the Dems screw things up. And the idea that the GOP believes it will continue to be a serious contender for political control when its basic narratives are couched in such racialist terms is nothing but a big, fat joke.
But here’s the point. Donald Trump has never put the needs of the GOP ahead of how he uses politics to promote himself. And if the GOP can’t figure out a way to get the Trump monkey of its back, it may end up becoming the 21st-Century version of the Whig Party – but what’s wrong with that?