Trump’s Ace in the Hole
Published at 21:46 on 3 April 2023
Trump has far better chances of winning in 2024 than some informed observers seem to think.
It all rests on what the group No Labels does. They have been rightly castigated as being mostly a benefit to Trump, and boy could they ever.
You see, despite how the media loves to fawn over them as the rational and reasonable ones, centrists have a really seamy and dare I say even militant underside. They know what they want, they want it really bad, and they will act on those wants, even to the ultimate detriment of their preferences.
It is exactly the same criticism often made of the Left, but it applies to centrists even more. Those of us on the left are at least constantly being lectured to about the dangers of refusing to compromise. But the same chattering classes that never tire of sermonizing the Left tend to see the Center as intrinsically “responsible.”
Witness what happened to Humphrey in 1968 (lost votes on the left) and McGovern in 1972 (lost votes in the center). There’s no shortage of voices blaming Humphrey’s lost on voters to the left sitting it out. By contrast, when it comes to McGovern those same voices… blame left/liberal voters for having selected McGovern in the first place! In other words: if you don’t support our preferred candidate, it’s all your fault, and if we don’t support your preferred candidate, it’s also all your fault.
Many centrists are so beset with feelings of entitlement, and so coddled and pandered to by the media, that they are largely shielded from being confronted with the downsides of their own political behavior. And many of them to this day have trouble seeing their hypocrisy.
It is in this light that the seriousness of a threat by a centrist No Labels candidate can fully be seen.
To the above you can add that Republicans tend to be more extreme and inflexible in general, meaning it will be much easier for a centrist to peel votes away from the Democrats. No Labels itself is aware of this; here is one of their initial projection maps showing how they hoped to win. Note how most of the states they think they can flip went for Biden in the last election:
They probably won’t do that well, of course. All it would take is them failing to flip Texas and Florida and boom! Second Trump term.