The National Elections of 2024: What’s Likely to Happen?
(Editor’s Note: This is adapted from a speech I gave to SOAR, the metropolitan Detroit Society of Active Retirees a few days ago. Hope you find it interesting!)
The National Elections of 2024: What’s Likely to Happen?
The most important national elections in our lifetimes are now only six months away. Based on what we know now, there are several likely scenarios for what may happen in not only the Presidential election, but also in Congress and in Michigan. So what’s likely to happen –and what will this all mean for the nation’s future?
Now for today’s subject: As I said to this group last fall, we really are facing what I believe will be the most important election of our lives six months and four days from now. What’s at stake are not a conventional set of competing policies, but democracy itself.
This is no abstract threat; Donald Trump has said he intends to be a dictator on the first day he takes office, among many other frightening things. We all know this.
You know, we as a people really have become like the proverbial frog in the pot — you know that story, right? Supposedly, you can put a frog in a pot on the stove, raise the temperature one degree at a time, and he sits there till he’s cooked. This is actually not true for frogs, by the way.
Soon as they get too warm, they hop out. But it does seem to be true for us. Think about this.
We have a man who is going to be the Republican nominee for President who has scores of indictments against him. He was been convicted already of sexual assault and ordered to pay millions. He is forbidden to run any business in the state of New York and owes a $365 million dollar fine.
He couldn’t legally run a lemonade stand in New York, but millions want him to run the country again.
There are currently four major cases against him; 1) The Hush-Money to a porn star case, the 2)Federal Election Interference Case, the 3)Georgia Election Interference Case and the improperly taken 4) Classified Documents case.
In the world in which most of us grew up, it would be inconceivable that anyone would nominate somebody with the baggage for dog catcher in Melvindale!
Never mind the attempt to overturn an election, the unsportsman-like refusal to concede defeat, the January 6 insurrection and the mishandling of the pandemic and the record in office of general incompetence and vulgarity.
We’ve gotten used to all this because we have really been the frog in the pot. If I had a time machine transporter, like the ones Captain Kirk used to have on Star Trek, and I brought someone to the present from the long-ago world, of say, the year 1990, they would probably look at all this and say …
“What in the hell happened to our country???”
That person, if they had any political savvy, would probably conclude that if any party would nominate a creature like that, they would be certain to suffer the worst defeat in history. They would consider that even more certain if you told them that under the incumbent president, who is running for reelection, there’s essentially full employment. That inflation, which was 7 percent in 2021 had now fallen to 3.5 percent, that the federal deficit, while too high, had dropped by more than a trillion dollars since President Biden took office.
Add that there are no major scandals like Watergate or even “Monicagate,” and most importantly that we now have no troops in combat anywhere in the world, and a political scientist a few decades ago might have concluded that we’d be facing not that we wouldn’t be facing an election, but a Biden coronation.
Yet that’s not at all what we are facing today. Instead, the candidates are roughly even in the polls. Several weeks ago, those polls showed Donald Trump significantly ahead, though lately President Biden has caught up.
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Additionally, virtually the entire Republican Party, especially those holding elective office, and especially at the federal level, has become little more than a cult of people who mostly privately know and mostly despise who and what their candidate is, even though they know his antics and meddling cost them control of the Senate and probably cost them badly in House elections in 2022.
I’m not talking about genuine idiots like Lauren Boebert or publicity hound Marjorie Taylor Greene, but about people like Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham and John Sununu. They know better. So before we move on to what’s likely to happen in November, we first need to ask this refined and highly academic question: How the Hell Did This Happen To Us?
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The answer is complex, of course, but has its roots in something that happened in 1987. Most people get their news from the broadcast media; they have since the early 1960s, and the airwaves are public property.
The government grants stations, like WDIV or radio station 950 in Detroit or a college station the right to broadcast on a certain frequency for a certain number of years. it used to be seven years. The company now called Audacy doesn’t own that space on the dial, as old timers used to say; they just lease it with a seven-year renewable lease. In the old days, the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC insisted that these stations provide news as a public service, and that it really be fair and balanced.
That meant the news product people got through the airwaves was essentially honest. Politicians might shade the truth and exaggerate their virtues and their opponents’ flaws, but if they flat-out lied, they usually got caught and there were consequences. You could certainly criticize those broadcasts as being too narrow; minorities and women were often slighted, to say nothing about LGBT and other gender-challenging people.
Broadcast news back in the day was also often late to the party when it came to civil rights or the anti-war movement, but what it did mean was people had a common set of intellectual furniture. You knew pretty much what people knew and talked about when it came to news.
But then in 1987, there was a move to essentially deregulate the airwaves and allow anything to go out on them. There were people who saw that there was a lot of money to be made, and people like President Ronald Reagan himself, who thought with all the new channels and new possibilities being created by cable and satellite TV that people would expose themselves to many new and different sources.
So the FCC got rid of the fairness doctrine. Congress knew better, and promptly passed legislation restoring it. Reagan vetoed their law, and they tried and just barely failed to override his veto.
So that opened the floodgates to Rush Limbaugh, and hate speech and dishonest and heavily slanted speech. Most, but not all of this was on the right, and soon people’s trust in their leaders and politicians and government was clearly declining. Plus, people soon tended to gravitate to one silo, or channel, that most expressed their particular prejudices.
Today, millions of people live in the MSNBC world, and even more millions live in the FOX world, some live in the CNN world, and they do not see reality in the same way.
Not at all. Which brings us to the famous election map you see all the time. Now, we all know what the red and blue stands for, and what red and blue states are. Thirty years ago, we didn’t have those terms. You know how we got red and blue?
Remember the disputed election of 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the one that wasn’t settled for 36 days when the Supreme Court intervened?
Well, at first “red” and “blue” were nothing more than the colors used to designate which presidential candidate had carried a state on TV maps on election night. Not every station used red and blue at first; ABC used green and yellow for a time, but then the colors were standardized. Well, during that famous disputed election, Americans saw those maps day after day, the nation frozen in two colors with Florida left blank.
There was a lot of bitterness after that election, and we started thinking of ourselves as two nations, the red and the blue, and not just in how we voted. Red people went to church more than blue people, we’d read.
Blue people were better educated, read more, ate in a more healthy way. Red people loved their country and their flag more, etc., etc. Now if anyone talked like that in 1960 or 1970, they would have been seen as crazy. And it does sound a little crazy, but since the 1980s, if not before, it’s gradually been becoming true, in large part because we were becoming two nations, in equally large part because we are self-segregating into two different worlds.
That was the case a long time ago, in the years before and for a few decades after the Civil War. But that wasn’t the case throughout the 1950s into the 1990s.
People often said “I vote for the man, not the party,” and other people nodded and approved. There was great volatility in the election map. In 1960 John F. Kennedy campaigned in 44 of the 50 states, and Nixon campaigned in person in all fifty.
That would never happen today. In 1964 the Democratic Presidential candidate, Lyndon Johnson, carried 44 of the 50 states. Eight years later, the Republican, Richard Nixon, carried 49 out of 50, and Ronald Reagan did the same in 1984.
Between 1964 and 1996 every single state voted Democratic at least once, and Republican at least once.
But since then, the gap in what the parties stand for has widened, and the states have become far more ossified But now, the vast majority of states are entirely predictable. As much or more so, I believe, than at any time in modern history, So let’s now look at the election map. You will see there are only six states that I think are truly swing states:
Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia. Those are the states in yellow. The ones in deep red are states that wouldn’t vote for a Democratic President if he were Jesus; the ones in lighter red are states that might think about voting Democratic if Trump were proven to be Satan … but probably not.
Ditto with the light and dark blue states; just switch the names of the parties and candidates. Now, most people list Michigan as a swing state, but it really isn’t.
True, it did vote for Trump by a tiny, 10,000 vote margin in 2016, but that was a fluke. Turnout was way down, Hillary Clinton ran a brain-dead campaign, here as in so many other places, and that was the result.
Four years ago. Biden returned Michigan to the Democratic ranks by 154,000 votes; Democrats have carried the state in seven out of the last eight presidential elections, and the odds are they will again.
Now, as I am sure you all know, thanks to the Electoral College, presidential elections are like a giant board game in which the winner has to accumulate states with 270 electoral votes. Every state has between 3 and 54, and it’s winner take all in every state except two.
Maine and Nebraska divide their electoral votes by Congressional district, with two at-large votes going to whoever carries the entire state. Maine is essentially a Democratic state with one Republican district; Nebraska is a Republican state with one Democratic district.
This election map is so frozen in place that for the first time in history we had a mirror-image result last time. Trump won 302 electoral votes to 236 for Clinton in 2016; Biden won 302 to 236 for Trump four years later.
Now, the number of electoral votes each state has, which is the same as the number of congressmen and senators they have, may change every time there’s a census, and the overall net effect over the last half-century has been to transfer votes from blue states to red states; from the east and upper Midwest to the far west and south. The states Biden won last time went from 306 electoral votes to 303 this year.
Michigan had 21 electoral votes in 1970;it has 15 now, Texas had 26; it has 40 now. There has also been somewhat of a continuing ideological re-alignment. Whether people voted Democratic or Republican in 1960 was largely a matter of economics. Now, it is at least as much about attitudes and ideology. Vermont used to be the most Republican state in the union. It now is totally Democratic and has a socialist senator.
West Virginia was Democratic to the core, in large part because so many of the coal miners and their families owed their survival to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
It voted for Adlai Stevenson and for Carter over Reagan and so many other Democrats who carried only a few states over the years.
But now almost all those voters have died, people have forgotten their history, joined the culture wars, and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton couldn’t even win one third of the vote there. They barely won a quarter of the vote there and in Wyoming, and Trump did almost that badly in Vermont and Hawaii and worse in the District of Colombia.
The Civil Rights Revolution gave most of the South to the Republicans, and New England to the Democrats, which from an Electoral College standpoint benefited the Republicans much more. But in recent years, lifestyle changes have been benefitting Democrats in the far and Rocky Mountain west. Colorado was a solidly Republican state when George W. Bush beat John Kerry twenty years ago. Now, it’s solidly Democratic. Nixon won Washington and Oregon. No Republican Presidential candidate can win them now. But Iowa has gone from leaning Democratic to solidly Republican in just the last decade.
So what’s the real outlook for this election?
There are six months before we vote, and we are in a volatile situation. We have the two oldest candidates in history. Biden will be almost 82 on November 5, and while we hear a lot about his age, Donald Trump will be 78, and unlike Biden is grossly overweight and has a bad diet.
People need to realize Biden is not running against a 50 year-old athlete! But both men are indeed old, and a major health episode involving either man could radically change the outlook. Trump is also under severe stress from his many legal difficulties, and should he be convicted of something before the election that too may have an effect.
If inflation rises a bit, as it did last month, that will hurt the President; if it declines, it helps him.
There’s also the war in Gaza, but I’m not sure that really has as much of an effect as people think, although we don’t know where we’ll be in six montjs. If you are Arab-American or otherwise from the Middle East, you won’t want to hear this, but the Arab-American vote really isn’t going to be much of a factor,
There’s not that much of it. Also, while there is no doubt that there’s a lot of anger at Biden over his failure to restrain Israel, it is difficult to see that community favoring Trump, who tried to ban most immigration from the Middle East and has talked of deportation and holding camps.
But they may not vote, and if the election is very close, anything could make a difference. And what might make far more of a difference is if the campus protests continue and get out of hand, and people blame the Biden Administration for them. Similar circumstances helped doom the Democrats in 1968, if you remember,
There are probably many more Americans with Ukrainian ancestry, and they aren’t voting for Putin … I mean Trump. If the economy and the world situation remain on a fairly even keel, I think the odds are that President Biden will be reelected. Four years ago, he won all the swing states on this map except North Carolina. The only one of those that I think he is likely to lose this time is Georgia, and demographic trends are making North Carolina more possible for Democrats.
What about third parties? Historically, they attract a lot of interest early in a campaign, but much of their support evaporates toward the end, and many who were drawn to them realize their preferred minor party cannot win, and so they vote for the lesser of two evils, or as Geoffrey Fieger used to say, “the less evil of two lessers.”
But we just don’t know.
Ralph Nader got less than two percent of the Florida vote in 2000, but that was enough to throw the presidency to George Bush instead of Al Gore. Jill Stein got only about 50,000 in Michigan in 2016, but that likely cost Hillary Clinton the state.
This year, most of the third-party buzz surrounds Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Some polls have shown him getting as much as 9 to 20 percent of the vote. It is extremely unlikely he’ll get anything like that, not only for the reasons I’ve already named, but because, well, he’s a nutty conspiracy theorist with a long pattern of erratic behavior. Most members of his family have made it clear that they are supporting President Biden. It’s not at all clear which major party he would hurt more.
While he has a very famous Democratic name, his famous father, who he closely resembles, has been dead 56 years; his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, has been gone for more than 60. Unless you are at least in your late sixties, it’s unlikely you remember the original RFK, and if you do know much about him, you probably would conclude he’d find his son’s views appalling. Kennedy is on the ballot in Michigan, as the candidate of something called the Natural Law Party, but so far he’s only qualified to be on the ballot in less than seven other states.
He does have one advantage in that his vice-presidential candidate, Nicole Shanahan, is immensely rich; she’s the ex-wife of Sergey Brin, a founder of Google. According to the Wall Street Journal, they supposedly got divorced after he caught her with … ready for this?
Elon Musk. You just couldn’t make up this stuff!
She’s indicated she intends to spend millions to help the ticket, so we’ll just have to see. I can tell you that Democrats think Kennedy will hurt them more, and are fighting to keep him off the ballot wherever they can. There will be a few other minor party candidates, including Jill Stein again and a Libertarian.
But all the press attention is likely to focus on RFK.
Well, that’s how the presidential contest looks now. We don’t know who is going to win, and on top of that, we don’t know what the aftermath of this election will look like, and that is reason to worry. This is something we’ve never had to worry about before. It was inconceivable before Trump that any candidate would refuse to concede defeat.
Say what you like about George W. Bush, but on the night he ran for reelection against John Kerry, he had a concession speech ready to read in case he lost.
The last presidential election was close, but not as close as Bush’s win over Kerry and historically not all that close as some. Biden won by seven million votes, four and a half percent; he had an overall majority of the popular vote.
Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, John Kerry and Gerald Ford all lost much closer elections, yet they conceded within hours. So did Hillary Clinton; so too, eventually did Al Gore, who won the popular vote, and lost Florida and the election by a suspicious 537 votes.
The only candidate since John Adams who never conceded and didn’t show up for the winner’s inaugural is Donald Trump. Instead, he encouraged a clumsy and amateurish attempt by a bunch of would-be cowboys, many of whom are now sitting in jail to overturn the election.
Well, what if, in this re-run of the last election, Trump loses again and once again tries to steal the election and launch violence? Well, Trump is highly unlikely to admit defeat even if he loses this time by a billion votes.
But if he does lose, I think he would find it very hard and probably impossible to stage anything like January 6 again. This time, he isn’t the President. He has no control over law enforcement agencies or anything else.
However the election turns out, it’s going to be Kamala Harris counting the votes, and the Biden Administration in charge of security.
Plus, consider this. If Trump loses what would be a second Presidential election in a row, and especially if he causes other Republicans to lose, as he did two years ago, he’s going to find that the same people in Congress who are kissing his behind now are going to turn on him, fast.
Suddenly, he’s a two-time loser, and lots of other Republicans want their turn at trying for the top prize.
Eventually, everyone uses up their fifteen minutes of fame, the public gets bored, and everyone else wants their turn. When that happens, we’ll all know it.
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I want to turn for a few minutes to the other elections this year. This is, after all, a national election, and every one of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 33 of the 100 senators are up for election, as are 11 governor’s races and every one of the 110 seats in the Michigan House of Representatives. No President and no Governor can accomplish very much of their agenda without a sympathetic legislature.
In other words, these are terribly important races, So let’s take a look at how things stand.
First, the Senate. How important are these Senate races? Can you spell United States Supreme Court?
Right now, Democrats have a razor thin, 51-49 advantage in the Supreme Court, although they really have only 48 seats. There are also three independents who caucus with the Democrats, all of whose seats are up this year: Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is 236 years old, Angus King of Maine, and Kyrsten Sinema of Outer Space, I mean Arizona, who has belatedly decided she’s not running for reelection after all.
Democrats really want to keep the Senate, but are at an almost unbelievable disadvantage. Besides the three independents, they are defending 20 seats; Republicans only 10. And it looks like every one of the Republican seats are safe; Democrats don’t have any hope of recapturing any of them. Now, most Democratic senate seats are safe too.
Republicans are running Steve Garvey, the former baseball player, in California, but he doesn’t have any real chance of beating Adam Schiff.
Democrats are defending so many seats, by the way, because these are people last elected in the big Democratic landslide of 2018, when people were showing their unhappiness with Donald Trump.
But there is one now Democratic seat that Republicans are certain to win, and that’s the West Virginia seat held by Joe Manchin, who really wasn’t much of a Democrat anyway.
And there are five other questionable or vulnerable Democratic seats. Now, if Democrats manage to win them all, and nothing else changes, the Senate next year will be tied 50-50. And if Biden wins, that means there will be a Democratic vice president who can serve as a tie-breaker.
But unless the Democrats win every one of these doubtful seats, why … how many ways can you spell gridlock?
So here are the five key races. The first is probably the strongest for the Democrats, and that’s Michigan, where Elissa Slotkin is running against Mike Rogers.
In Ohio, it’s Sherrod Brown against a Trumpster salesman Bernie Moreno; Nevada is Jacky Rosen v (probably) Sam Brown .
Arizona features Congressman Ruben Gallego against election denier Kari Lake.
And in deepest red Montana, Jon Tester, a Democrat and a rancher who has somehow been elected to three terms, will probably be running against Tim Sheehy (the state hasn’t had its primary yet.)
To keep control of the Senate, the Dems have to win every one of those races.
The U.S. House of Representatives is about as closely divided as it could be: 217 Republicans, 213 Democrats and five vacancies. You’d think with all the musical chair Speakers and rampant jackassery, Democrats would be a cinch to win control,but it is a case of 435 different elections. Michigan interestingly, could make the difference: There are two open districts that have been held by Democrats; one held by the retiring Dan Kildee and the other by Elissa Slotkin and Republicans will be making a major effort to win both.
Otherwise in the state, the state Senate, which is narrowly controlled by the Democrats, 20-18 is not up for election till 2026, but every seat in the House is, and Democrats have a 56-54 edge. If Republicans take back control, that’s the end of Governor Whitmer getting her agenda passed.
Well, that’s a brief summary of where we are. One other thing: What, what about the old question of getting rid of the electoral college: That’s not happening, but in a few years, Ranked Choice Voting just might. Look it up and read about it!
Now to editorialize: I think the best thing that could happen to this country is a solid Trump defeat that makes the Republican Party realize they need to recalibrate everything they’ve been doing.
Rebuilding the GOP
I should add that we really need a healthy and honest Republican Party, and whatever your politics, we should all be working for that. Sooner or later, there will be another Republican governor of Michigan and another Republican President, and we need them to be honest and normal.
In fact, if you look at historical trends, it is likely, all other things being equal, that Republicans will win in Michigan in 2026 and nationally in 2028.
The parties tend to trade off with a different one taking power every eight years. That’s happened in this country since 1952, with the exception of three one-term presidents, Bush I, Carter and Trump. That’s also been the case in Michigan, the parties swapping the governor’s office every eight years, with one exception – John Engler, who served twelve years — for more than 40 years.
Regardless, at some point Republicans are certain to be back in power in both this state and nation, and our survival as a democracy depends on having two healthy and decent parties who support the constitution.
We ignore that, at our peril. Today we have a convicted criminal who has vowed to be a dictator if he gets back into office, to pardon those guilty of insurrection, and has made it clear he thinks he’s above the law.
He and those around him have already poisoned the process and our democracy and are very likely to destroy it if they again attain power.
That’s why this election is perhaps more important than any we’ve ever had in history. Thank you.
