The White House is not officially on the ballot tomorrow although it certainly is on the ballot unofficially. Many see tomorrow as a tacit referendum on the Biden presidency.
Donald Trump is gearing up for another run at the Oval Office and has already started taking pot shots at his potential rivals for the Republican nomination, which is unfortunate because such conduct probably hurts him more than it helps.
In any case, National Review's Rich Lowry has an essay up in which he compares the relative merits of Trump and Florida's governor Ron DeSantis.
Lowry makes a compelling case that DeSantis is the better option for Republicans going into the 2024 campaign season. He writes:
There are huge pitfalls to Trump 3.0 that would be easily and nearly completely avoided by nominating and electing DeSantis, or any other Republican alternative. (I don’t take it as an absolute certainty, by the way, that DeSantis will run, or that if he does, it will come down at the end to the Trump–DeSantis contest everyone expects.)Lowry makes several good points, among which are these:
The difference between nominating Trump and DeSantis — the delta in terms of Republican prospects and governing potential — is hard to exaggerate.
1. A President Trump would be four years of mayhem. "Democrats would certainly find a reason to deny the legitimacy of a President DeSantis, but his cabinet secretaries probably wouldn’t have to have bomb-sniffing dogs checking their cars every morning."
2. Trump at 76 is much more vigorous than Biden, but, if Biden does run again, which I seriously doubt, " a Trump–Biden race will be aged-on-aged violence that will be a great victory, one way or the other, for the American gerontocracy. A DeSantis–Biden race, on the other hand, would set up a simple future-vs.-past contest like Clinton vs. Dole in 1996 or Obama vs. McCain in 2008.
"Although Trump looks as if he could be doing campaign rallies until he’s 90, time comes for us all. There’s no guarantee that Trump won’t start encountering Biden-like aging problems, either during a general election or in a prospective second term. Why risk it, when there are palatable, new-generation alternatives?"
3. Trump would be a serious problem for other Republicans in other races. "If he’s the nominee, every Republican in the country would either have to endorse his delusions about the 2020 election or find a way to dodge them. And Trump would be paying attention. He’d presumably be happy to take shots at anyone in the party not showing sufficient loyalty to 'stop the steal,' no matter how destructive."
4. Trump would have much more difficulty governing than DeSantis. "Trump did a number of truly consequential and creative things policy-wise while in office, but his erratic nature also limited his ability to deliver. A vendetta tour against all his real and perceived enemies would now be layered on top of this.
"Assuming that Mitch McConnell is still the GOP leader in the Senate, do Republicans really want a newly elected president and a Senate majority leader who don’t speak to each other and, worse, a president who has insulted that majority leader in crude and personal terms?"
5. Related to the above, Trump would likely find it very difficult to find top level people willing to work in his administration, knowing that they'd be setting themselves up for harsh personal public insults as soon as they crossed him.
"He has much more of a policy apparatus and government-in-waiting than in 2016, but he’ll still have trouble hiring for top positions, and a miasma of legal controversies will continue to trail him everywhere. Again, why choose that when there are other alternatives who’d start with a clean slate and be able and willing to work with everyone in the party?"
6. Finally, Trump is much more likely than DeSantis to allow his personal character flaws to alienate voters and cause him to lose a race that should be easily winnable (like 2020).
DeSantis has most of Trump's virtues with none of his vices. He's a solid conservative - socially and economically - with apparently no scandal in his background, and he's a fighter, albeit of a different style than Trump.
At this point, he looks like a much better choice for Republicans in 2024, than a man who did most of the things conservatives elected him to do but who did them in a fashion that repelled far too many voters who would've otherwise been inclined to deny Joe Biden their vote in 2020.
