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There is no going back to pre-Trump, any more than there's going back to pre-FDR. The milk is spilled, the eggs are broken, the die is cast. Trump is not the driver of this sentiment, he is just the only one willing to harness the latent desires of the electorate.
If you care about corruption, Nancy Pelosi's career of insider trading is right there. What you want has nothing to do with corruption, or you'd mention the net worth of politicians on a congressional salary. You'd mention book deals that are explicitly excluded from bribery and ethics policies. What you want is something else.
I think what you want is to return to the migration consensus, because that's what I think is the only true difference between politicians and parties these days. You know this is true because of what happened in France, where, when push comes to shove, there's the remigration party and there's everybody else. This explains the Never-Trumpers and the likes of the Cheneys and Mitt Romney. This explains the hysteria over Trump, and the uniparty. Maybe I'm wrong, but I this isn't about corruption, and Trump is not particularly corrupt when compared to other politicians.
Nancy Pelosi's stock market gains are not anything crazy. She just gambled on the tech market going up, and it did. The average congressperson's portfolio doesn't particularly outperform the market.
She gambled on the tech market going up, and also supported a lot of pro-tech-company legislation. I don't think pelosi is special, but that's definitely a conflict of interest. Politicians should be forced to put their assets in a trust like carter did, or better yet liquidate most of wha they own and dump all their money into an index fund.
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But who else can? J.D. Vance? Seems kinda unlikely. Desantis? Tried once, failed... maybe he could succeed without Trump as opposition, but it seems doubtful. What the Democrats hope is not that the GOP goes back to pre-Trump, but that their base basically dries up and blows away, becoming an unaffiliated and impotently dissatisfied group who can be ignored electorally. The GOP keeps the neocon remnants that haven't gone over to the Democrats, plus a few paleocons and business republicans who aren't neocons, and as a result is so small that it never is able to mount a serious challenge again.
I mean it’s not necessarily going to be a Return To PreTrump. Somebody will take the crown simply because the sentiment precedes Trump and will be around without him. The MAGA crowd has now tasted real power, if you think they’re going to allow this moment to fade without any significant victories, you’re mistaken. And with that power available, someone (probably someone anointed by Trump himself) will take the cause and run with it.
I guess the question is how many MAGA presidents would have to lose in a row before they gave up?
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Vance, DeSantis, Abbott, and Scott are the obvious candidates that spring to mind, and I wouldn't rule out Kushner or Don Jr. either. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans also have a reasonably deep bench of young-ish state level officials of which i expect at least a couple to ready for promotion to the national stage within the next 4 years.
Recall that no one outside of Florida had even heard of DeSantis prior to 2016. (Sure he'd been a state rep. since 2012 but how many people know who thier own state rep. is much less who anyone else's is?)
Which Scott?
Alexander, of course. By 2028, his time in California will have tipped him over the edge.
He would never go into politics, lol. I'd eat my hat!
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You can have your own views on the Republican bench, and I'll say as a Democrat, in theory, the GOP has plenty of possible statewide elected officials.
But just in the swing states, the Democrat's will have Rueben Gallego, Roy Cooper, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Stein and that's not getting into somebody like Wes Moore in Maryland. Now, I'm sure you likely don't like anybody I Just listed but those people are all statewide elected officials who have won or in the case of Gallego, will have won solidly in swing states.
Obama was a first term senator but he had unique magic. I’m not sure that Gallego is the same way. Cooper is a red state democrat who for that reason doesn’t have a progressive record to run on; this probably makes him a better national candidate, but seems likely to cause problems in a democrat primary. Shapiro and Whitmer are actual possibilities, although Whitmer is uniquely polarizing and Shapiro is likely to cause some issues with the Muslim vote.
I maintain that the top three Republican candidates by default going into 2028 are Abbott, Desantis, and Hawley. It’s possible Vance makes it onto the list, but it’d require a pretty good four years for him. I’d point to Cruz and Youngkin to round out my top five instead.
If Trump wins and there are a decent four years then it would seem that Vance is likely a shoe in for the nominee. He would be endorsed by a popular two term Republican president. I could see him making RDS the VP.
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Out of your list, I think only Shapiro and Moore are actual national possibilities. The rest are some variation of Blue Scott Walkers or nobodies whose current media attention is pretty much an in-kind campaign contribution.
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Shapiro makes sense but makes Michigan perhaps easily red.
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The problem for the Republicans is what does the post-Trump era look like.
I love J.D. Vance. I think he's the smartest politician we've seen for a long time and he is clued in to the real problems we face in a way that the dinosaurs in both parties are not. He is probably one of the few politicians who has read Scott.
But let's be honest. He'd get slaughtered in the general. High IQ white guys like Vance don't win minority and blue collar voters.
Now that the Republicans have gone populist, they will need populism to win. It feels overly dramatic, but I am seriously worried that unless Trump wins we will have uniparty rule for a long time.
The GOP’s 2028 nominee won’t be any Republican that people are talking about today. It won’t be a white man. Given the inexorable demographic trends, it will be an Hispanic populist outsider. Think Nick Fuentes but with greater respectability, and who has ties to the military. America will want a military leader to deal with challenges posed by China or Iran. Someone Trumpian and with a bio that could fill out a webpage like this.
Hispanics don’t particularly want a Hispanic candidate, they want a strong white male leader who gets what he wants and has a sufficient number of Hispanics in his inner circle to prove he’s going to bear their interests in mind.
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I feel like this is something the Pumpkin-Spice class tells itself to justify not even bothering to try. Reagan, Bush II, and to a lesser degree DeSantis, all being clear counter-examples.
Maybe I'm over updating. I'm a huge DeSantis fan who legit thought that he would win the Republican nomination. He is massively popular in Florida. But he couldn't even get off the starting block.
So here's my updated theory. In the current climate, 95% of the media is enemy territory. You need some sort of guerilla strategy to get airtime. Simply having a great track record and great ideas isn't enough. Look what the media did to Vance. If he gets coverage at all in the media, it's heavily negative. Meanwhile, a midwit like Walz gets tons of positive coverage despite having a terrible record and being a phony to boot. So Republicans need to hack the media to win, which is what Trump did in 2016.
The idea that a conventional candidate like Romney or Bush Sr. could thrive in 2024 just seems anachronistic. The elites wholesale abandoned the Republican Party for the Democrats starting around 2010. Without their support, you need something special.
I don't know. I hope I'm wrong.
As i touched upon downthread, I think DeSantis' problem was that he was running as the "Trump-Lite" candidate against Trump himself, and that there was no particular reason for anyone already inclined to vote for Trump (or an otherwise Trump-ish candidate) to pick him over the genuine article.
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I wonder how much Twitter changes this. It really does feel like Musk’s takeover of the platform has had major benefits for non-leftist media and organisation, and perhaps suggests strategies for the right going forward — most crudely, getting RW billionaires to buy space in the public forum.
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