The Republican party in America is too detached from reality to allow confidence about what's going to happen next, but I have to say that I'm feeling good about having made this call about the governor of Florida when he was riding a wave in the way-back time of December, 2022.
For those interested in early prognostications related to the 2024 presidential election, the Sabato Crystal Ball, named for the political scientist Larry Sabato, of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, pegs the electoral college competition at Biden 260, The Unknown Republican 235, with just 43 in the toss-up category. The four toss-up states, with their allotment of electoral votes noted, are: Georgia (16), Wisconsin (10), Arizona (11), and Nevada (6).
Since it takes 270 to win, you can see that, were this scenario to play out, Nevada is irrelevant: to win, the Republican needs to sweep Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia, because Nevada plus the larger two of the other three results in a 270-268 victory for the Blues. Though if it turns out to be that close, we'd have to consider what happens in Nebraska, since, while deep red, it awards electoral votes by congressional district, and by winning the one centered on Omaha the Republican could then pull into a 269-269 tie. But Biden won that district by more than 6 points, so if he loses it in 2024, he's probably losing Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona, too. The working assumption here is that a presidential election is like an interrelated system in which the individual parts do not operate independently of the others. It follows that the winner of, say, Wisconsin, is a good bet to win Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, too. If that were to happen, in Biden's favor, then the ubiquitous blue-red map would be unchanged from 2020.
The most striking aspect of this preview is probably the shrinking number of competitive states. Suppose we add to the list of toss-ups the states Sabato and his team think only "lean" one direction or the other. That captures only North Carolina (leans Republican) and, leaning the other way, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Michigan. There are then still 42 states that aren't competitive. At least many of the residents of those states might be spared from the advertising onslaught. I'm a little worried for myself, living as I do in the Twin Cities, with media tentacles extending well into western Wisconsin.
It's odd how so much can seem to happen without altering anything. I might have thought that there's justice in the sorry plight of the DeSantis campaign, but it's not as if Republican voters appear poised to render an apt judgment upon his candidacy. Trump's an indicted criminal defendant, and it's going to happen again, and again, with overwhelming evidence of his guilt in each case—here, for example, is the audio and transcript of the phone call to Georgia officials in which he clearly solicits election fraud and makes thinly veiled threats about what could happen to them if they don't do as he says. Poor DeSantis is trying his best to be an a-hole, but how can he compete with that? He likely hasn't even raped anyone.
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