Are you paying attention to the GOP primaries? You're missing the real campaign news
Third-party types are already deep into planning for the general election and pitching especially hard to the country's largest voting block: people who identify as independent.
Iowa is over and New Hampshire looms large as former President Donald Trump aims for inevitability as the Republican nominee for president.
Still, his horse race with Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis goes round and round with vigorous news coverage.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t going to be president. But his campaign can tilt the margins if his independent bid, which preempted his initial Democratic primary push, gets on the ballot in enough states. He formed the “We the People” party this week to push that process.
Kennedy is best known as a controversial conspiracy theorist who doubts the effectiveness of vaccines. But he brands that with one of the best-known names in American politics, an imprimatur that rings nostalgic with some older Democrats.
We were hit with a blizzard of coverage last week for the Iowa caucuses, where less than 15% of Republican voters in that state engaged in the process as sub-zero temperatures descended with the candidates.
Now Haley and DeSantis are finally ramping up criticism of Trump ahead of Tuesday's New Hampshire primary. File that under: Too little, too late.
The real action is in November’s general election when third-party contenders who can’t win can still influence who loses. We’re all watching the wrong race.
The electorate is antsy. President Joe Biden won in 2020 by promising the restore the normal order of government that went so stupendously awry during Trump's one term. But now Biden is deeply unpopular.
Again, voters face an election where the choice is less about who you support and more about who you oppose.
While all this unwinds, the third-party types are already deep into planning for the general election and pitching especially hard to the country's largest voting block – people who identify as independent.
The math here looks like bad news for Biden, since the the third-party candidates seem far more likely to draw from his pool of support then to tap into Trump's base.
0 Comments