It is 2024, and it looks like I am doing this again. This is, after all, an important thing that needs to be talked about.
It is Monday, January 15, and the United States Presidential Primary season is beginning. Unusually, the first contest of the season starts on a Monday. I had to double check that: I am currently in Costa Rica, and the times and seasons in the United States seem strange to me. It is frigidly cold in Iowa. It is a tropical limbo in Costa Rica.
The Republican primary is a contest between Donald Trump, who was impeached twice and indicted at least four times, against Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, and Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and Trump's own former UN Ambassador. At the time I am writing this, Trump seems to have about 50% of the vote, against around 20% of the vote for DeSantis and Haley. In years past, when the primary process was a more structured process, where seemingly small differences in margins could effect the success and strategy of a campaign, I would wait a while to look at the specific of the numbers. Because as much as I did find it slightly amusing that the delegate math of say, winning American Samoa did impact the nomination, the point was that a presidential nominating contest was a careful construction of a coalition, a process of deliberation where candidates tried to maximize their appeal. And that this was an important part of a process.
But the point here, in 2024, is that a man who has clearly abused the process and abused his office, and who has lost an election, is not only winning a caucus, but is winning it by a clear margin. In years past, the slightest whiff of scandal would damage a candidate's prospects, and losing an election was taken as a sign to retire. But here, all the laws of political gravity, and even the basic morals and ethics at a folk level, have been demolished. Yes, half of Iowa's electorate doesn't view Trump as the automatic candidate. And this is the first contest of many. But without getting into what the exact numbers are, the point here is that the conventional rules of the primary process seem to be a long gone thing.