One Year After Losing, No One Has a Better Chance of Being Elected President in 2024 Than Donald Trump

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

One year ago, Donald Trump lost his presidency by a rather large margin in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Just over nine months ago, Donald Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for a second time. And yet somehow, there is a strong argument that, as of today, no one has a better chance of winning the next presidential election than Donald Trump.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that he has more than a 50% chance of pulling off what would be probably be the most dramatic comeback in American political history, but rather only that there is no one, including President Joe Biden, who is more likely than Trump to be president in early 2025.

The math on this equation is actually quite simple. Trump first has to actually run, and that appears to be a near certainty. In fact, the only logical scenarios where he does not run are if he is in prison (which, despite widespread liberal fantasies, is extremely doubtful), in very bad health, or if he decides to bailout at the very last second after having cleared the field due to serious candidates being afraid to run against him.

Currently, all of these outcomes are statistically very unlikely. So, barring a very major event, if only because his ego demands it, Trump is going to run for president again.

Then of course he has to win the Republican nomination. There are only two potential candidates, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who could theoretically defeat Trump in one-on-one battles (in a protracted three-way race between them, it would be very difficult to see, given the size of his base, how Trump possibly loses).

Trump’s stranglehold on the party, while surely formidable, is a bit overrated, especially given last night’s results in Virginia and New Jersey where Republicans who did not fully embrace Trump did so well. However, there is a decent likelihood that Trump is not forced to face a direct challenge from someone who can actually pull off an upset against him.

Obviously, DeSantis and/or Haley would have to first decide to run themselves, and there is a reasonable chance that they will take a pass. After all, the prospect of defeating Trump in a GOP primary is daunting and, because of the slash-and-burn nature of the way Trump campaigns, extremely dangerous to an opponent’s future prospects. DeSantis has the added problem of having to run for reelection in 2022, all while his wife battles serious health concerns.

As of now, there is at least a 50% chance that Trump will be the 2024 Republican nominee. There are only two possible candidates that he would face on the Democratic ticket: either Biden or the current vice-president, Kamala Harris.

If events continue in their current direction, especially given how poorly Democrats did last night, there may well be a less than 50% chance that the Democratic candidate is Joe Biden. Should the president decide not to run, there would probably be a contested primary, but under the new rules of “wokeness,” it would be deemed racist and sexist to contest a Harris coronation, so she would likely coast to the nomination, assuming anyone of note had the audacity to get in the race against her.

This means that, unless Covid and inflation somehow disappear, there is a very good chance Trump ends up running against an ancient and weak Joe Biden with a dismal first-term record, or against the perfect representation of “wokeness” run amok in Harris. In either situation, Trump would have at least a 50% chance of winning.

Keep in mind, no conservative knows more than me how incredibly unpopular Trump is with the majority of Americans, and how counter-productive it would be to have him as the Republican nominee (again, especially after last night proved you can still get Trump voters without him being deeply involved). However, the path towards an Electoral College win for Trump in 2024, while incredibly narrow, is remarkably plausible for even him to navigate.

Because the margins ended up looking so impressive for Biden in 2020, the vast majority of political commentators don’t realize that had a few thousand votes gone the other way in just Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, we would have had a 269-269 tie, and that this same exact map in 2024 would actually result in a Trump victory because of changes in the allocation of votes per state.

Trump clearly has hurdles to getting back in the White House… his health, potential legal troubles, DeSantis/Haley, and Biden/Harris… but not a single one of them is intimidating and, if events continue on anything close to their current trajectory, each of them might end up being rather easily overcome. Obviously a lot can and will happen between now and two years when the 2024 campaign really gets heated up, but Trump becoming president again is at least as likely as any other rational scenario.

You can’t say that you were not warned.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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