(Editor’s Note: What follows is a fantasy which is almost certain not to unfold quite as described here. However, all this is perhaps more likely than Donald Trump’s election would have seemed three years before it happened.)
DETROIT, Nov. 6, 2024 — There is probably a professional gambler somewhere who is glumly calculating how rich he or she would be if, back in early 2022, he had bet on Joe Biden to not only win reelection, but do so with more than 400 electoral votes — the most anyone has gotten since 1988.
But that is exactly what happened. Donald Trump’s second defeat was essentially sealed in April when Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and a few other figures announced that the Republican Party they knew and loved had been hijacked “by an unprincipled and unconstitutional gang,” and that they were forming the Loyal Republican Party to give voters a principled alternative.
“Even if we don’t win, we will give voters who believe in the principles of a free market, a strong defense and our Constitution someone they can support,” Cheney said when she and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich accepted the new party’s nominations for President and Vice-President.
For a brief time, some hoped the new ticket might send the election into the House of Representatives, but that quickly faded, partly because of something you might call The Amazing Resurrection of Joe Biden. People started finding his occasional verbal slips appealing and his grandfatherly demeanor charming, and a welcome contrast to the nastiness of the two warring GOP factions, who throughout much of the campaign seemed more interested in attacking each other than the Democrats.
Biden was certainly helped by the fairly rapid decrease in inflation, which had fallen to 2.7 percent by early 2024, and of the rapid dwindling of Covid-19 cases and deaths after the omicron wave flamed out in late summer of 2022. Former President Trump did catch a break when he managed to stall most of the legal proceedings against him, and breezed to his third presidential nomination brushing off Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
For a brief time, he surged into a polling lead when he announced that South Carolina’s Nikki Haley would be his running mate. But his campaign was fatally wounded when in August, before an open microphone, he called Cheney a truly unprintable four-letter word. Haley declined the nomination, and was eventually replaced by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem after the former President awkwardly apologized for his verbal gaffe.
The Biden campaign was also helped by a reassessment of the once-unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris, who risked her own life to save a child victim of the horrendous 2023 hurricanes, and who managed to get the better of Russia’s Vladimir Putin during an impromptu debate when she stood in for the President at a summit.
Republicans had managed to gain 25 seats and win control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022. But Democrats actually strengthened their hold on the U.S. Senate that year, since many more vulnerable GOP seats were at stake, and about all the GOP’s control of the House did was showcase their factional wars.
President Biden also blatantly copied Harry Truman’s 1948 attack against a “do-nothing Congress,” and when the House refused to pass his new agenda, which included middle-class tax cuts and money to make college affordable, he successfully pleaded with voters to give him a legislature which would do just that.
The President’s margin slipped in the final days of the campaign, as some GOP voters returned to the Trump fold after it became clear that the Cheney-Kasich ticket couldn’t win, but the margin was convincing enough. Biden won 49 percent to 36 percent for Trump and 13 percent for the Cheney-Kasich ticket, which did manage to carry Utah, Idaho and Wyoming.
Mr. Trump won only the farm states from North Dakota to Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina, plus Kentucky and Tennessee. Democrats took back control of both houses of Congress.
Though the election was decisive, the result left many questions unanswered. Could the Republicans heal and reinvent themselves as a center-right party with broad appeal to independents and a commitment to recognizing legitimate authority — and a willingness to occasionally engage in bipartisan cooperation?
Could Democrats somehow reach the tens of millions of Trump supporters who plainly believe they are anti-American, or worse?
Why had both parties twice nominated the oldest Presidential candidates in American history – and when would either party propose some realistic solutions for the economic future of the declining industrial and manufacturing cities of the heart of the nation, like Toledo and Detroit?
Those questions are likely far more important than any single presidential election — and will be much, much harder to solve.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
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