U.S. closer to repugnant presidential rematch

A small minority of Iowa’s tiny minority (0.96%) of the U.S. population has spoken. This week, a portion of New Hampshire’s 0.42% will speak. By Feb. 24, when South Carolina (1.63%) will be heard from, these three states might have consigned the other 97% of Americans to a November choice that disgusts a whopping majority.

Writing in National Affairs, Wheaton College political scientists Bryan T. McGraw and Timothy W. Taylor say that in 2016, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump “had the lowest favorability of any candidates in presidential polling history.” Eight years later, a Joe Biden-Trump rematch probably would establish a new low.

Iowa gave Trump the outcome he probably wanted. The icing on his Iowa cake — he won 97 of 99 counties by at least 10 points — was Nikki Haley’s failure to finish off Ron DeSantis’s campaign. The former South Carolina governor might have done this if 2,500 more voters had propelled her past him into second place.

Her chance of stopping Trump is substantially better than that of DeSantis, whose mistaken assumption has been the Republican nominating electorate wants a less feral, more pastel version of Trump. This electorate wants a brawler, which DeSantis is, but it will not embrace a less entertaining incarnation of today’s political tribalism.

Thirty-five states, with 63% of the nation’s population, have voted for the same party in this century’s six elections. Political competition is so suspended, like a fly in amber, that ticket-splitting is rare.

More than half of the 1,215 convention delegates needed to secure the GOP nomination will be allocated March 5, 10 days after South Carolina’s primary. By limping on for six more weeks, DeSantis complicates Haley’s task of deflating Trump by defeating him in her home state.

Trump’s cascading legal distractions, driven by progressive prosecutors, have strengthened his grip on his party. If, however, Trump is inaugurated 371 days after the Iowa caucuses, progressives will have accomplished perhaps the largest self-inflicted wound in U.S. political history.

The second-worst news drenching President Biden’s campaign is: Although no Republican presidential candidate has won among voters under 30 since 1988, the New York Times-Siena College poll last month showed Trump leading Biden with that cohort 49% to 43%, a 10-point swing since July. Even worse news for Biden is this:

A USA Today-Suffolk University poll finds his support among Black voters at 63%, a 24-point collapse since 2020. In 1964, four months after achieving enactment of the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon B. Johnson won 94% of the Black vote.

Before the Supreme Court ends this mischief, let’s end applause for grandstanding officials in blue states who ban Trump from ballots on the ground the 14th Amendment makes him ineligible because on Jan. 6, 2021, he participated in an “insurrection.” Stretching that concept enough to disqualify the man currently leading him in polls, Biden, in a statement remarkably silly even considering the source, said that on Jan. 6 “we nearly lost America — lost it all.” Oh? A rabble’s fourhour tantrum, which briefly delayed the certification of the 2020 election, nearly did what four years of Confederate military campaigning could not do?