The One Big Thing Everyone Misses About 2024

Jonathan Last: “An incumbent’s presidential record can be attacked. Some voters may like it. Some may not. But at the lizard-brain level, they have all seen him sitting at the big desk in the Oval. They know what he looks like as president.”

“An insurgent candidate has advantages, too. But having to clear the bar of being plausibly presidential is the biggest and most fundamental disadvantage any insurgent faces. If a candidate can’t do that, then nothing else he has going in his favor matters.”

“At the risk of stating the obvious: Joe Biden is president of the United States. Donald Trump used to be president of the United States.”

“How rare is this? The last time—the only time—it happened was in 1892 when President Grover Cleveland and former president Benjamin Harrison ran it back from the 1888 campaign, in which the insurgent (Cleveland) defeated a sitting president (Harrison).”