Here comes that outsider 2024 Republican presidential candidate I warned you about
Republican political boosters are reportedly gearing up to push Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin into the 2024 presidential race. This isn’t a surprise. Contrary to the constant chatter that you hear, Donald Trump does not have some unique lock on the Republican primary voting base. Trump and Ron DeSantis were tied until DeSantis got on the stage and face planted. And that was before everyone figured out that Trump is senile and headed for prison.
If DeSantis’ rollout had only been half as disastrous as it was, DeSantis would be the Republican 2024 frontrunner right now, not Trump. Youngkin doesn’t have all that much going for him, beyond his ability to come off as a moderate while pushing extreme positions. But at this point it wouldn’t take much to topple Trump.
Again, Ron DeSantis would have been the Republican 2024 nominee if he weren’t such a complete walking disaster. Donald Trump is only still holding onto the “Republican frontrunner” mantle for now because DeSantis imploded. The kicker is that even as DeSantis lost roughly 35 points of support over the past few months, none of it went to Trump. No one is getting on the Trump bandwagon at this point. All of DeSantis’ support was dispersed among the other candidates. It’s just that they’re all such weaklings, none of them was able to consolidate the support that DeSantis lost.
So if the Republicans can find an outsider candidate who’s as well-bankrolled as DeSantis, but isn’t as much of a creepy weirdo as DeSantis, it wouldn’t be difficult at all to imagine that candidate quickly consolidating the roughly 45% of Republican primary voters who are dead set on Trump not being the nominee, and then using that momentum to try to cut into the 55% that Trump is still feebly clinging to.
Is Youngkin that guy? Eh. We’ll see. But it’s still totally realistic that some outsider could enter the Republican race and end up with the nomination. I laid out this scenario more than a year ago, warning everyone that once Trump started getting indicted and became non-viable, Republican donors would try to sneak an outsider into the race late in the game, and count on that candidate gaining momentum before the media had a chance to do any proper vetting. And now that’s what Republican donors are trying to do.
No, it wouldn’t be a good thing. Youngkin is an extremist monster under all that moderate clothing. So is anyone else who might be able to win the 2024 Republican nomination. But yes, it’s entirely realistic to think that someone other than Trump could be the nominee. After all, nominating a broken senile has-been who’s going to be in prison sounds like a fun and rebellious thing to do until you actually get to the voting booth. And the first Republican primary votes won’t be cast for another five months. There’s still a lot of time for the ground to keep shifting, in what is already the most unstable Republican presidential primary in history.
