Again, that’s convention wisdom. But for a political cycle that’s so written in stone, there sure seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that maybe, just maybe, the November marquis billing might look a little, or perhaps a lot different.

On the Republican side, if you turned away from the campaigns for the holidays, which millions of Americans do outside of Iowa and New Hampshire, you probably went into the break believing that Ron DeSantis had collapsed and Nikki Haley was surging, but because Trump is so far ahead, it doesn’t really matter.

Since that time, Nikki Haley couldn’t or wouldn’t say what caused the Civil War, then spent the next three days non-stop to explain what she of course meant to say while simultaneously refusing to admit she tanked the answer the first time around. We should see some polling out of the Granite State soon which will tell us if this was just a gaffe or her Vivek Ramaswamy moment where voters said, “Hard pass.”

In Iowa, a random Tweet/X popped up on New Year’s Eve from Dr. Cody Hoefert. He is a chiropractor, serves on the Rock Rapids, Iowa City Council, and was the co-chair of the Iowa State GOP for seven years until Biden was inaugurated. He’s also endorsed Ron DeSantis, so account for the lie of the green here.

Interesting conversation with 7-8 first time voters aged 17-21 after church today. They asked me to come over and I asked them who they were going to caucus for.

I said Trump: they said old news

I said Haley: they laughed and said no chance

DeSantis: they said yea we really…

— Dr Cody Hoefert (@drcodyhoefert) December 31, 2023

Caucuses are funny things. They’re unpredictable. People go into a big room, and by the time it’s all over, alliances have shifted. Could the retail politicking in all 99 counties by DeSantis pay off after all? Are there a bunch of potential caucus goers for DeSantis that aren’t being picked up by polling?  Possibly.

The Daily Mail has a new poll out conducted by J.L. Partners of a 1,000 likely voters, and among Republicans, if Donald Trump is out of the picture, a notably big if at this point, Republicans overwhelmingly support DeSantis by 15 points over his next closest rival, Ramaswamy. In fact, you’d have to go through Donald Trump, Jr., who isn’t running, before you’d get to Nikki Haley in fourth place on the alternatives list.

DeSantis has to outperform current polling in Iowa. He has to at least finish second, and a lot closer to the former President than 33 points, which is the latest Real Clear Politics average.

But as we begin 2024, the Democratic side looks a lot more interesting to me. Joe Biden appeared on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve 2024 with Ryan Seacrest, who I’m convinced will host the real life Hunger Games consisting of J6 tributes from all of the country’s districts if Biden does get a second term. But I digress. Biden was on vacation again, this time in the Virgin Islands, and was joined by his wife, Dr. Jill Biden. Here’s one of Seacrest’s hard-hitting questions as Houthi terrorists are attacking U.S. Navy vessels in the Red Sea, and there’s hot wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Notice that Joe needed help from Jill to remember he was eating ice cream. This guy.

I’m surprised he didn’t say tapioca, because his cognitive abilities are reaching the consistency of pudding these days. Here’s another grab from Seacrest, clearly seeking a Pulitzer for this hard-hitting line of questioning. What were Biden’s 2023 highlights?

I guess when your job approval is in the 30s and nobody on the world stage is paying a lick of attention to you or your secretary of State, I could see where he’d stumble looking for an accomplishment. Coming out of COVID? Really? Didn’t we come out of COVID, oh, about the time he passed the Biden stimulus plan we didn’t need, leading to a year and a half of inflation? Come on, man. At least Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has a highlight for 2023. It’s unconstitutional as the day is long, but it’s a highlight, for now, until the Supreme Court weighs in. Biden’s had another year as the leader of the free world, and his highlight is jobs overseas coming back? I thought Bidenomics were going great. Why didn’t he lead with that one?

This was on New Year’s Eve, 2023. At 81 years old, this was Joe Biden’s best day. He will be slower, less cognitive, less mobile, less mentally nimble, every day that’s torn off the calendar. By the time the Democrats get to the convention, will President Weekend At Bernie’s really be able to pull off a national campaign? As John Sexton wrote over the break, even NBC News is getting nervous about November.

So if not Joe, who? Again, conventional wisdom is that Kamala Harris would be the natural replacement nominee. Sure, the siren song of California Governor Gavin Newsom might be appealing to some, but he got spanked by DeSantis in that Hannity debate. Newsom faces a $68 billion dollars deficit which will balloon once the new law inviting illegal aliens to sign up for free health care. The cost of that “free” health care will be paid for by fewer and fewer residents as wealthy Californians flee for states with friendlier tax burdens. In addition, the optics of the Democratic National Committee bypassing a black female in Kamala Harris to get to another white male may be too much to ask of the Democratic base.

Here’s the conundrum for me. If not Biden, it’s got to be Harris, or at least a black female. Harris, over the holiday break, resurrected her Kwanzaa lie.

Remember that she was born in 1964. Kwanzaa wasn’t invented until 1966, but it didn’t really become a thing until the early 80s when she would have been in college. There is more chance that Joe Biden’s Amtrak story is true than the Harris family celebrating Kwanzaa when she was growing up. She’s proven herself to be an abject moron during her time on the world stage, and that’s after Democrats didn’t like her enough in 2020 that she never even made it to the Iowa Caucus in her doomed presidential bid.

Democrats know she can’t win in 2024. She can’t win in 2028. She’s a horrible candidate, doesn’t know anything, and nobody really likes her. As a Republican, if the party opens the floor under Biden only to prop up Harris, I’m ecstatic, because any Republican we field will beat her. I know this. Democrats know this. So if not Joe, and not Harris, either, then who?

John Ruddick is a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council, and is a liberal Democrat. He penned a column in the Australian Spectator. Here’s a bit of what he writes.

There is a campaign within the highest echelons of the Democratic Party to destabilise Joe Biden and force his polls down further until he is convinced to withdraw from 2024. Axelrod is playing a central role. The plotters however would not go to the acute bother of knocking out an incumbent if they didn’t have a replacement in the wings.

…

Michelle didn’t run in 2016 because it was immediately after her hubby had been President for eight years … that would have reeked of nepotism. In 2020 the Obamas and Axelrod likely calculated Trump was on track for re-election – before Covid hysteria betting markets gave Trump a 70 per cent chance of winning. They had been planning 2024 since 2016 … but Biden’s 2020 victory and intention to recontest have complicated things.

You know where the DNC convention is this summer, right? Yup. Chicago. Her home town.

She has said repeatedly she’s not interested in running. I don’t blame her. Who’d want to deal with a bruising primary – debates, going to Iowa and New Hampshire for months leading up to the caucus and primary? Hillary Clinton tried all that twice and look what that got her. But having the Democratic party hand her the nomination, bypassing the primary fight, and being asked to be the knight dressed in white to save the Democratic Party, save the country from its existential threat to democracy, and save the world from high fat snack food? That’s a different story altogether.

Here’s Michelle Obama’s Instagram photo released for Christmas.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Michelle Obama (@michelleobama)

Notice anything about this picture? She is dead center. She’s in a white dress and is the primary focal point in the picture. I don’t think that’s by accident. She will demur every time she’s asked, because no person in their right mind would hint that the job might be fun to explore at this point. But if the field came to her, meaning she didn’t have to run a primary campaign, the party begged her to step in, and she were running against Donald Trump? That’s about as easy of a political layoff as it gets in American politics these days. She’d win going away. Remember that Daily Mail/J.L. Partners poll? They list Michelle Obama as an alternative if Biden can’t run. She crushes it with indies, and would repeat that in the general election. That would be her margin of victory, by how much she wins the independents.

I’ll accept conventional wisdom, for now. Joe Biden, so long as he can show proof of life, will be the nominee. But if he can’t answer the bell in August, and that is a long, long way off for a guy who we see degenerating by the day, who else would the Democrats parachute in? They obviously want to win, and everyone not named Kamala Harris knows Harris isn’t the way. Michelle Obama is the only possible replacement candidate that makes sense.

The only way to fix the Democratic future is to revisit their past.