The results of Super Tuesday, the subsequent withdrawal of Nikki Haley from the GOP race, and Joe Biden managing to get through his State of the Union speech without face-planting into his lectern virtually ensure that the election match-up we want least is the one we'll get.
Donald Trump versus Biden will be the first "rematch" since Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson in 1956 (a comparison which tells us something about our decaying political culture). It will also be the first in which our two major parties nominated an incumbent president and a former president since way back in 1894 (although Teddy Roosevelt went third party, split the GOP vote with incumbent and former protégé William Howard Taft, and thereby handed the presidency to his nemesis Woodrow Wilson in 1912).
What this means is that come November we face an election in which the electorate will be both more thoroughly familiar than usual with the choices before it and thoroughly discouraged by that familiarity.
Although neither candidate was viewed favorably in 2016 it was still possible for some to vote for Hillary Clinton with a smidgen of enthusiasm or at least hope. There was that first female president possibility and some fond memories of Bill. In Trump's case there were lots of voters, even many generally disapproving of his personality and behavior, who nonetheless thought that a straight-talking businessman was what the country needed at that point.
Four chaotic and embarrassing Trump years later, it was understandable that people found hope in Biden, the old Washington hand who could bring the grownups back into the room and return us to "normalcy."
2024 will, however, be an election singularly lacking in hope, or even much capacity for wishful thinking. We have fully taken the measure of Biden and Trump and know that whichever wins what comes after will be bad. If Trump wins, the craziness returns, probably even turned up a few notches. If Biden wins, we get accelerating infirmity, the same array of destructive policies, and likely, by around this time next year, President Kamala Harris.
Whereas Biden is essentially forcing himself upon the Democrats out of ego and stubbornness, the Republicans appear bent upon enthusiastically becoming the first party since 1940 to nominate the same candidate for three consecutive presidential election cycles. Franklin Delano Roosevelt by that year had proved to be the most effective vote-getter in American history, and there was every reason for Democrats to believe his winning streak would continue (which it did, and four years later as well).
In remarkable contrast, Republicans are going for the third time in a row with a former president (a revealing formulation in itself) who might be every bit as bad at the vote-attracting business as FDR was good. Apart from Trump's sizeable contributions to the dismal GOP results for 2018, 2020, and 2022, there is the almost impossible to accomplish feat of having lost the popular vote to both the political equivalent of Nurse Ratched and then the fellow we used to call "Obama's impeachment insurance."
It's as if Republicans had decided after the wipeout of 1932 that Herbert Hoover had to be their guy forevermore.
Indeed, the more eminently winnable elections Trump causes Republicans to lose, the more they seem to want him and the tighter his grip on them becomes, to the point where there has likely never been a party so thoroughly dominated at all levels by a single public figure. Even FDR could be pressured at the 1944 Democratic convention by a clique of party leaders to take the dramatic step of dumping his running mate, erratic Vice President Henry Wallace.
One can't imagine any group of influential Republicans having the nerve to get together and try to pressure Trump on anything, let alone do so successfully.
This is, in part, because there are now no "influential Republicans" left to even be eligible for such a role, so thorough has been Trump's takeover and purge.
MAGA is now the GOP, and Trump is MAGA. And in the MAGA party all that matters is loyalty to dear leader.
More alarming still is the prospect that, even if Trump loses yet again, as still seems likely, even to the debilitated Biden, nothing within the GOP will change--the "stolen election" script will again be trotted out, lack of evidence notwithstanding, and Trump's revenge tour will simply be rescheduled for 2028, with another Trump-inspired off-year election debacle arriving in between.
And his followers will accept all of it, and the 2028 primaries will look pretty much like this year's.
A bedrock principle of political science is that political parties exist first and foremost to win elections. But because an apparently sufficient number of Republicans would rather lose with Trump than win with anyone else, we should either rethink that principle or redefine the Republican Party as something other than a political party, perhaps as just Trump's personal political vehicle.
Since the Republican nomination for president will apparently belong to Trump for as long as he breathes, perhaps even "Never Trumpers" should hope for him to prevail in November.
Just so he can never run again.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.