What was all that back there?

| 3:00 pm EDT September 29, 2023
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It might help some of us to put this year into perspective by considering that the year before the 2012 race heated up, there was a scary poll the media was pushing that showed then-President Obama losing by eight points to a generic Republican contestant.

The GOP primary that year was considerably more scattered than the one right now, but President Obama’s administration had just suffered a catastrophic midterm while Republicans and leftists alike accused him of not doing enough on the economy. The prospective Republican nominees largely embarrassed themselves when they did campaign, however, and President Obama went on to win re-election rather easily.

We’re seeing a lot of the same thing play out, only with a Democratic Party that has outperformed voting expectations consistently over the last two years, and a Republican Party that’s even more demented than the Tea Party that took over the House in 2011.

Wednesday night was about the peak of it, as Donald Trump, the GOP likely nominee, embarrassed himself in a rambling nonsensical speech while the candidates most people have never heard of had a debate at the Reagan Library that was mostly just a rehash of the first one, with moments even less memorable. As much as the media likes to bait the idea of a Republican comeback, they appear in public and remind us who they are.