Trump has already called her "birdbrain", which would seem to be put a damper on the relationship.
Ignoring that, the possibility of picking the top runner-up as your running mate is something that seems to get talked about every single election (ESPECIALLY if it's seen to bring some sort of "balance" to the ticket, e.g. Obama/Clinton) and nonetheless it never happens, it's seen as a bad idea. I have to think with Trump's ego, it's even less likely than normal.
The least surprising way for Trump not to be nominated is for him to be dead by the convention. That’s not very likely, but it wouldn’t cause me to rethink how the world works, y’know? He’s old and unhealthy, stuff happens.
If he’s still alive next August and someone else is the R nominee, something really weird has gone down
Right, I think that when prediction markets say e.g. “28% chance of Biden not being the nominee” they're mostly referring to the odds of him being dead or otherwise incapacitated by old age. I don't think the odds of that happening are really that high, but they're a long way off zero.
My guess is that this includes a lot of 81-year-olds who already know they are ill (for example, people with cancer or who've had recent heart attacks or strokes). Biden seems like he's in pretty good shape for his age, it's just that at his age almost everyone is retired and focused on going on cruises or spoiling their grandkids rather than on trying to keep the country and the world from falling apart.
Yep! And Biden seems to be in at best average health for his age, and he can't spend 2024 in a bunker like in 2020, so 93% should be the *ceiling* today for him getting a second term. Then add in the odds of him having some kind of non-fatal medical catastrophe that renders him incapable of standing, the odds of an assassination, the odds of something career-ending unexpectedly emerging from the Hunter stuff, the odds of an unknown-unknown scandal, the odds of a disqualifying policy failure (e.g., the total collapse of Ukraine). I wouldn't put all that at 28% (maybe 15%?) but I don't think 28% is laughably unreasonable.
I agree with your general logic here, that the various contingencies add up. I would take issue with the "at best average health for his age" and subsequent assumption of 7% being his ceiling on mortality alone. Biden doesn't smoke or drink, isn't obese, and doesn't have (known) serious health problems. And he's active; the clip of him falling over on the bike is funny, but seriously how many 80-year-olds do you know who bike in the first place? He also has access to the finest medical care in the world, and you can bet those folks are taking a proactive approach to the problem. All that has to be good for a pretty steep reduction in his mortality risk, right?
Of course if that part is only 7% of the 15% you're estimating (or the 28% the market is), pulling that number down from 7 to like, 5 doesn't really change the overall number tremendously...
I looked over an actuarial table for becoming permanently disabled in old age and it's somewhat less than the probability of death each year, maybe around 2/3. Of course, not all disabilities would necessarily disqualify one as President (cf. FDR), but at minimum any new disability would lead to one last reassessment, on top of everything else, of whether Biden needs to step aside.
The probability of being murdered is already in the actuarial death table. You could argue that Presidents are more likely to be murdered than the median elderly American based on history, but I'm skeptical. More people want to kill them, but they also have an extremely robust and acutely paranoid security detail, which has improved a lot since the last successful attempt and even since the last serious unsuccessful one (Reagan/Hinckley). Also they have best-in-the-world access to trauma care, which has been streamlined since Reagan. Every past POTUS assassination except JFK would almost certainly have been prevented with modern medicine.
So I'm inclined to say something like 12-13% for death or disability. The only other credible possibility is scandal. I don't think getting denied the nomination over a "disqualifying policy failure" is a real possibility at this point. A recession would be a much bigger deal to voters than Russia overrunning Ukraine, but you don't deny the nomination to a standing President over a recession.
I'd round the probability of scandal down to 0%, but maybe be generous and give it 1% and you get to 13-14%.
Great that you found some actuarial stats! I love that you knuckled down and did the maths—especially as you came to essentially the same conclusion to me lol.
But this is my point really: that 14% vs 28% is a much less significant difference than 14% vs 1%.
One wild card not mentioned- Haley is from South Carolina, a state that seemingly wouldn't be a good fit for her "lane" in the primary but one that has deep connections with her. If she wins NH and SC, you'd have a real competition.
The Republican primary is sort of unusual this year. Trump can only serve one term so coming in second - positioning for the next election - should be a bigger prize than in a typical "open" primary. And more interesting than a "race for second place" normally would be.
Obama was prescient in that he understood that second place just means the right wing echo chamber has a long time to jack up your negatives. So since George W Bush (who remains the only beneficiary of the right wing echo chamber because the mainstream media underestimated the right wing echo chamber) it’s best to be underestimated and let the partisan media focus on another candidate and drive up their negatives.
Second place is the way that McCain and Romney both won the nominations in the following cycles. I'd posit that both of them would have stood little chance if not for their previous runs putting them on the national map. Perhaps Romney more so -- anecdotally I had already heard of McCain in 2004 but never heard of Romney before 2008.
We had all heard of Obama before 2008, I remember multiple people telling me he was going to be President one day, following his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. He didn't need a run to raise his national profile.
HOWEVER, in my opinion one key difference is that Haley (and DeSantis) both have a larger national profile than McCain or Romney did in 2004/2008. DeSantis only became a household name after 2020, but Haley's name has been batted around so much in the past decade that I apparently falsely remembered her briefly running for the nomination in 2016.
I'll contend that Vivek is the only person who is really raising his national profile as a result of this run. And maybe to a much, much lesser degree Burgum, who zero people outside North Dakota had ever heard of and now somewhat more than zero have heard of.
McCain won a worthless nomination because everyone knew a Democrat was going to be president in January 2009. Romney is the human version of vanilla ice cream and Democrats were able to jack up his negatives the longer he stayed in the spotlight.
At the time, it didn't feel that worthless. My recollection of the thinking as the 2008 primary season unfolded was that the Democrats were favored but Republicans had a real shot. Obama was seen as untested and possibly radical. McCain sort of a centrist (this was before he decided to saddle himself with Palin). It was only in the summer that the financial crisis unfolded in full, Obama clearly outcampaigned McCain, and the Republicans were undoubtedly toast.
2.
Even if the fundamentals were known to be that awful, I can't think of anyone who would have beat McCain but decided to step aside and wait for a better year. McCain would most likely have won the primaries whether 2008 was a good GOP year or a bad one.
3.
You might be right about a relative unknown having an advantage in the general. But as an individual, you want to optimize for winning the primaries, which are the much tougher contest, even as a Republican, and name recognition is most of the game there. So when it comes to maximizing P(winning primaries) * P(winning general), you want every bit of name recognition you can get.
I agree name recognition is the key which is why Trump could win with near universal name recognition even with never holding political office. With respect to 2008, Hillary stayed in so long because her campaign believed a refrigerator box could beat the Republican nominee long before the Financial Meltdown. The Bush economy was weak all 8 years and so Rove ran a campaign based on terrorist attacks and rally round the flag and gay scare in 2004.
“Haley has a strong electability argument — with high-quality polls often showing her trouncing Biden”
—Nate has had this fixed idea for a while, but it isn't really true. There are lots of polls showing that Haley performs worse against Biden than Trump does. Her electability argument is weak at best, and relies totally on the false premiss that the media would treat her just as gently as an actual Republican nominee as they are treating her now as an anti-Trump avatar.
Exactly the mechanism. And what irritates me a little about this stance of Nate's is that *he accurately diagnosed the inverse situation*, that RFK Jr would lose salience as soon as it was no longer convenient for the right-wing media to cynically puff him up to undermine Biden. Haley isn't Trump's equivalent to McCain in 2000, she's Trump's equivalent to RFK Jr in 2024.
I’m sorry, I’m really sorry but who cares about Nikki Haley? If it wasn’t for the RINO wealthy class Haley wouldn’t even be on the ballot. But ok sure, let’s pretend real MAGA people are going to vote for her instead of Trump.
Two groups care about Haley. Political writers who want a horse race and wishful thinkers who want to believe the GOP isn’t wholly taken over by Trumpist black shirts.
I agree Haley faces the steepest of uphill struggles. I'll call her odds of taking the nomination 5%. But what does the world where that 5% shot becomes reality look like? I'd argue there's some danger to Haley in peaking too early, and that her best outcome is to soundly beat expectations in NH, no matter what those expectations have become. Doesn't doesn't necessarily mean winning outright in that state. It probably means a scenario where she's, say, twelve points behind Trump in the final NH polls, and ends up losing by only three points. Something like that. I think she'd then have serious momentum coming out of the Granite State. (And sure, being behind Trump in NH by 10-12 points in the polls and then winning by a few points also works.)
The scenario whereby she's picked up a big head of steam heading into NH—and lots of people are asking: "Can she actually beat Trump?" — and she does so—doesn't put her in the catbird seat, I'd argue, unless she absolutely crushes him. But that doesn't seem plausible. A four or five point win over Trump when a lot of people are thinking you might well win isn't a game-changer.
And in any event Haley absolutely needs DeSantis's campaign to well and truly implode. If he maintains some viability and relegates Haley to third place in Iowa, it's over for Nikki, I fear. She doesn't need it to be a two person race coming out of New Hampshire. She needs it to be a two person race *heading into* New Hampshire.
Donald Trump has made countless repeated false claims about the 2020 election, as have been proven and continue to be proven during multiple hearings and court cases.
How current/predictive in primaries are the geo-segmentations of the US articulated in books like Albion's Seed or American Nations? And if yes, it would seem like maybe Nikki is limited to Yankeedom.
“We’ve reached the point where the nominee being someone other than Trump would be perhaps the most surprising development in the history of the presidential primaries.”
I strongly disagree. This cycle is different. Trump is facing 90 felony charges. That is unprecedented. Both of the candidates are historically old. I’m not sure previous models hold that much water at this point. Nate’s old model might hold up in the weeks before the election, but there are few good precedents for the present situation.
That's all well and good, but the GOP electorate's view of their choice is crystal clear and has survived a cavalcade of scandal unprecedented in American history.
If you think there's a "this is too far" moment, you haven't been paying attention.
And keep in mind Trump is still the best Republican president of this century. So Democrats are not the issue here—Republican voters are the issue and have been since 2004. The GOP establishment has no credibility with Republican voters…and keep in mind the only reason Trump can run again is because McConnell has allowed it. So McConnell had the impeachment articles in his hand not once but twice and chose to protect Trump.
"the nominee being someone other than Trump would be perhaps the most surprising development in the history of the presidential primaries."
Point taken and overall like the analysis, but I'm inclined to offer RFK's assassination as a more surprising event. Particularly an assassination by, of all things, a Palestinian Christian belonging to a Rosicrucian organization. I don't think many people had that on their bingo cards in 1968.
Though my understanding is that, contra the narrative most often remembered, Humphrey was favored (albeit not assured) to beat RFK for the nomination at the time of RFK's death.
Nominating contests were very different back then…they changed pretty quickly in the 1970s which is why Carter was able to game the process. Humphrey and Mondale are examples of traditional establishment candidates while Carter and Clinton were outsiders that beat the establishment. So in 2008 Hillary made a comment [and this is not a joke] that the establishment and mainstream media distorted to imply she was referring to RFK’s assassination when in reality she was referring to the establishment refusing to endorse her husband. So superdelegates were a response to candidates gaming the system.
I think that Haley is a candidate for a second, but I don’t really know if I’d say that she’d be a strong contender for 2028 or not. 2028 will probably be the most unpredictable primary since 2016 for the GOP, unless Trump loses or runs again or something.
Trump is absolutely the favorite for 2028 (health permitting), but it will probably be a closer contest. That's assuming he loses the general in 2024, which still seems correct to me.
Hard to see him getting the nomination in 2032 even if he's alive.
Nate wasn't Clinton a heavy front-runner vs Obama for the 2008 Dem nomination? (I think ~20pts ahead in avg of national polls at this point in the cycle?) Just curious if there's a reason you didn't mention that particular race.
Nate, just curiously, what do you think of the odds of Biden winning the primary but dropping out before the convention. If Trump's numbers in swing states continue to hold, do you think this could actually happen, or is this just a media / progressive pipe dream?
Surely that's the Republican pipe dream, as at that point it would be almost impossible to stop Kamala being the nominee, since she'd already be on the ticket as VP.
The reality is being the leader of the pack in the year before the actual nominating contests probably is a negative. The optimal position is to be running somewhat under the radar like Biden and Obama or to be seen as a joke like Trump. The leader just draws too much fire and their negatives end up getting jacked up.
Hey sorry all, I didn't mean to have comments off. (This is probably the *least* spicy take I've published here in a while, TBH.) On now.
Would it make any sense for trump to tap Haley as a VP pick? Would Haley even be interested in the position after what happened with Pence?
Trump has already called her "birdbrain", which would seem to be put a damper on the relationship.
Ignoring that, the possibility of picking the top runner-up as your running mate is something that seems to get talked about every single election (ESPECIALLY if it's seen to bring some sort of "balance" to the ticket, e.g. Obama/Clinton) and nonetheless it never happens, it's seen as a bad idea. I have to think with Trump's ego, it's even less likely than normal.
The least surprising way for Trump not to be nominated is for him to be dead by the convention. That’s not very likely, but it wouldn’t cause me to rethink how the world works, y’know? He’s old and unhealthy, stuff happens.
If he’s still alive next August and someone else is the R nominee, something really weird has gone down
Right, I think that when prediction markets say e.g. “28% chance of Biden not being the nominee” they're mostly referring to the odds of him being dead or otherwise incapacitated by old age. I don't think the odds of that happening are really that high, but they're a long way off zero.
I just Googled it - apparently the probability of an 81-year-old dying within the next year is about 7%.
My guess is that this includes a lot of 81-year-olds who already know they are ill (for example, people with cancer or who've had recent heart attacks or strokes). Biden seems like he's in pretty good shape for his age, it's just that at his age almost everyone is retired and focused on going on cruises or spoiling their grandkids rather than on trying to keep the country and the world from falling apart.
Yes, obviously 7% is the naive prior probability. Joe Biden is not a normal 81-year-old!
Yep! And Biden seems to be in at best average health for his age, and he can't spend 2024 in a bunker like in 2020, so 93% should be the *ceiling* today for him getting a second term. Then add in the odds of him having some kind of non-fatal medical catastrophe that renders him incapable of standing, the odds of an assassination, the odds of something career-ending unexpectedly emerging from the Hunter stuff, the odds of an unknown-unknown scandal, the odds of a disqualifying policy failure (e.g., the total collapse of Ukraine). I wouldn't put all that at 28% (maybe 15%?) but I don't think 28% is laughably unreasonable.
I agree with your general logic here, that the various contingencies add up. I would take issue with the "at best average health for his age" and subsequent assumption of 7% being his ceiling on mortality alone. Biden doesn't smoke or drink, isn't obese, and doesn't have (known) serious health problems. And he's active; the clip of him falling over on the bike is funny, but seriously how many 80-year-olds do you know who bike in the first place? He also has access to the finest medical care in the world, and you can bet those folks are taking a proactive approach to the problem. All that has to be good for a pretty steep reduction in his mortality risk, right?
Of course if that part is only 7% of the 15% you're estimating (or the 28% the market is), pulling that number down from 7 to like, 5 doesn't really change the overall number tremendously...
I looked over an actuarial table for becoming permanently disabled in old age and it's somewhat less than the probability of death each year, maybe around 2/3. Of course, not all disabilities would necessarily disqualify one as President (cf. FDR), but at minimum any new disability would lead to one last reassessment, on top of everything else, of whether Biden needs to step aside.
The probability of being murdered is already in the actuarial death table. You could argue that Presidents are more likely to be murdered than the median elderly American based on history, but I'm skeptical. More people want to kill them, but they also have an extremely robust and acutely paranoid security detail, which has improved a lot since the last successful attempt and even since the last serious unsuccessful one (Reagan/Hinckley). Also they have best-in-the-world access to trauma care, which has been streamlined since Reagan. Every past POTUS assassination except JFK would almost certainly have been prevented with modern medicine.
So I'm inclined to say something like 12-13% for death or disability. The only other credible possibility is scandal. I don't think getting denied the nomination over a "disqualifying policy failure" is a real possibility at this point. A recession would be a much bigger deal to voters than Russia overrunning Ukraine, but you don't deny the nomination to a standing President over a recession.
I'd round the probability of scandal down to 0%, but maybe be generous and give it 1% and you get to 13-14%.
Great that you found some actuarial stats! I love that you knuckled down and did the maths—especially as you came to essentially the same conclusion to me lol.
But this is my point really: that 14% vs 28% is a much less significant difference than 14% vs 1%.
President Wilson
One wild card not mentioned- Haley is from South Carolina, a state that seemingly wouldn't be a good fit for her "lane" in the primary but one that has deep connections with her. If she wins NH and SC, you'd have a real competition.
The Republican primary is sort of unusual this year. Trump can only serve one term so coming in second - positioning for the next election - should be a bigger prize than in a typical "open" primary. And more interesting than a "race for second place" normally would be.
Obama was prescient in that he understood that second place just means the right wing echo chamber has a long time to jack up your negatives. So since George W Bush (who remains the only beneficiary of the right wing echo chamber because the mainstream media underestimated the right wing echo chamber) it’s best to be underestimated and let the partisan media focus on another candidate and drive up their negatives.
Second place is the way that McCain and Romney both won the nominations in the following cycles. I'd posit that both of them would have stood little chance if not for their previous runs putting them on the national map. Perhaps Romney more so -- anecdotally I had already heard of McCain in 2004 but never heard of Romney before 2008.
We had all heard of Obama before 2008, I remember multiple people telling me he was going to be President one day, following his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. He didn't need a run to raise his national profile.
HOWEVER, in my opinion one key difference is that Haley (and DeSantis) both have a larger national profile than McCain or Romney did in 2004/2008. DeSantis only became a household name after 2020, but Haley's name has been batted around so much in the past decade that I apparently falsely remembered her briefly running for the nomination in 2016.
I'll contend that Vivek is the only person who is really raising his national profile as a result of this run. And maybe to a much, much lesser degree Burgum, who zero people outside North Dakota had ever heard of and now somewhat more than zero have heard of.
McCain won a worthless nomination because everyone knew a Democrat was going to be president in January 2009. Romney is the human version of vanilla ice cream and Democrats were able to jack up his negatives the longer he stayed in the spotlight.
1.
At the time, it didn't feel that worthless. My recollection of the thinking as the 2008 primary season unfolded was that the Democrats were favored but Republicans had a real shot. Obama was seen as untested and possibly radical. McCain sort of a centrist (this was before he decided to saddle himself with Palin). It was only in the summer that the financial crisis unfolded in full, Obama clearly outcampaigned McCain, and the Republicans were undoubtedly toast.
2.
Even if the fundamentals were known to be that awful, I can't think of anyone who would have beat McCain but decided to step aside and wait for a better year. McCain would most likely have won the primaries whether 2008 was a good GOP year or a bad one.
3.
You might be right about a relative unknown having an advantage in the general. But as an individual, you want to optimize for winning the primaries, which are the much tougher contest, even as a Republican, and name recognition is most of the game there. So when it comes to maximizing P(winning primaries) * P(winning general), you want every bit of name recognition you can get.
I agree name recognition is the key which is why Trump could win with near universal name recognition even with never holding political office. With respect to 2008, Hillary stayed in so long because her campaign believed a refrigerator box could beat the Republican nominee long before the Financial Meltdown. The Bush economy was weak all 8 years and so Rove ran a campaign based on terrorist attacks and rally round the flag and gay scare in 2004.
“Haley has a strong electability argument — with high-quality polls often showing her trouncing Biden”
—Nate has had this fixed idea for a while, but it isn't really true. There are lots of polls showing that Haley performs worse against Biden than Trump does. Her electability argument is weak at best, and relies totally on the false premiss that the media would treat her just as gently as an actual Republican nominee as they are treating her now as an anti-Trump avatar.
Yeah, compared to Trump she would still get the criticism from MSNBC without the full-throated backing from Fox News.
Exactly the mechanism. And what irritates me a little about this stance of Nate's is that *he accurately diagnosed the inverse situation*, that RFK Jr would lose salience as soon as it was no longer convenient for the right-wing media to cynically puff him up to undermine Biden. Haley isn't Trump's equivalent to McCain in 2000, she's Trump's equivalent to RFK Jr in 2024.
I’m sorry, I’m really sorry but who cares about Nikki Haley? If it wasn’t for the RINO wealthy class Haley wouldn’t even be on the ballot. But ok sure, let’s pretend real MAGA people are going to vote for her instead of Trump.
Two groups care about Haley. Political writers who want a horse race and wishful thinkers who want to believe the GOP isn’t wholly taken over by Trumpist black shirts.
Plus devoted Nikki Haley fans, which comprise maybe 0.01% of the electorate.
I agree Haley faces the steepest of uphill struggles. I'll call her odds of taking the nomination 5%. But what does the world where that 5% shot becomes reality look like? I'd argue there's some danger to Haley in peaking too early, and that her best outcome is to soundly beat expectations in NH, no matter what those expectations have become. Doesn't doesn't necessarily mean winning outright in that state. It probably means a scenario where she's, say, twelve points behind Trump in the final NH polls, and ends up losing by only three points. Something like that. I think she'd then have serious momentum coming out of the Granite State. (And sure, being behind Trump in NH by 10-12 points in the polls and then winning by a few points also works.)
The scenario whereby she's picked up a big head of steam heading into NH—and lots of people are asking: "Can she actually beat Trump?" — and she does so—doesn't put her in the catbird seat, I'd argue, unless she absolutely crushes him. But that doesn't seem plausible. A four or five point win over Trump when a lot of people are thinking you might well win isn't a game-changer.
And in any event Haley absolutely needs DeSantis's campaign to well and truly implode. If he maintains some viability and relegates Haley to third place in Iowa, it's over for Nikki, I fear. She doesn't need it to be a two person race coming out of New Hampshire. She needs it to be a two person race *heading into* New Hampshire.
Stop calling them “false claims” please. The truth of the 2020 election lies somewhere along a continuum, not in one side’s back pocket.
Nate, can you turn the comments back off?? ;)
If only Rudy had tried the truth is somewhere on a continuum defense to his defamation case. I’m sure that would have helped.
I doubt anyone set out to deliberately steal the election, but it was dirty on so many levels. Only a blind partisan would claim otherwise.
Yet so little actual “dirt” can ever be presented in a way that meets any minimum legal evidentiary standard.
There’s all this evidence supposedly. But it nobody ever sees it.
Donald Trump has made countless repeated false claims about the 2020 election, as have been proven and continue to be proven during multiple hearings and court cases.
How current/predictive in primaries are the geo-segmentations of the US articulated in books like Albion's Seed or American Nations? And if yes, it would seem like maybe Nikki is limited to Yankeedom.
Early primary states do not determine the eventual winner.
Instead, they winnow out candidates who have no chance of winning and narrow the field to 2-3 competitive candidates for later primaries.
Then the winner typically emerges in the next few weeks by winning many big primaries.
“We’ve reached the point where the nominee being someone other than Trump would be perhaps the most surprising development in the history of the presidential primaries.”
I strongly disagree. This cycle is different. Trump is facing 90 felony charges. That is unprecedented. Both of the candidates are historically old. I’m not sure previous models hold that much water at this point. Nate’s old model might hold up in the weeks before the election, but there are few good precedents for the present situation.
That's all well and good, but the GOP electorate's view of their choice is crystal clear and has survived a cavalcade of scandal unprecedented in American history.
If you think there's a "this is too far" moment, you haven't been paying attention.
And keep in mind Trump is still the best Republican president of this century. So Democrats are not the issue here—Republican voters are the issue and have been since 2004. The GOP establishment has no credibility with Republican voters…and keep in mind the only reason Trump can run again is because McConnell has allowed it. So McConnell had the impeachment articles in his hand not once but twice and chose to protect Trump.
"the nominee being someone other than Trump would be perhaps the most surprising development in the history of the presidential primaries."
Point taken and overall like the analysis, but I'm inclined to offer RFK's assassination as a more surprising event. Particularly an assassination by, of all things, a Palestinian Christian belonging to a Rosicrucian organization. I don't think many people had that on their bingo cards in 1968.
Though my understanding is that, contra the narrative most often remembered, Humphrey was favored (albeit not assured) to beat RFK for the nomination at the time of RFK's death.
Nominating contests were very different back then…they changed pretty quickly in the 1970s which is why Carter was able to game the process. Humphrey and Mondale are examples of traditional establishment candidates while Carter and Clinton were outsiders that beat the establishment. So in 2008 Hillary made a comment [and this is not a joke] that the establishment and mainstream media distorted to imply she was referring to RFK’s assassination when in reality she was referring to the establishment refusing to endorse her husband. So superdelegates were a response to candidates gaming the system.
I think that Haley is a candidate for a second, but I don’t really know if I’d say that she’d be a strong contender for 2028 or not. 2028 will probably be the most unpredictable primary since 2016 for the GOP, unless Trump loses or runs again or something.
Trump is absolutely the favorite for 2028 (health permitting), but it will probably be a closer contest. That's assuming he loses the general in 2024, which still seems correct to me.
Hard to see him getting the nomination in 2032 even if he's alive.
Nate wasn't Clinton a heavy front-runner vs Obama for the 2008 Dem nomination? (I think ~20pts ahead in avg of national polls at this point in the cycle?) Just curious if there's a reason you didn't mention that particular race.
Nate, just curiously, what do you think of the odds of Biden winning the primary but dropping out before the convention. If Trump's numbers in swing states continue to hold, do you think this could actually happen, or is this just a media / progressive pipe dream?
Surely that's the Republican pipe dream, as at that point it would be almost impossible to stop Kamala being the nominee, since she'd already be on the ticket as VP.
The reality is being the leader of the pack in the year before the actual nominating contests probably is a negative. The optimal position is to be running somewhat under the radar like Biden and Obama or to be seen as a joke like Trump. The leader just draws too much fire and their negatives end up getting jacked up.