OPINION:
If you’ve got $1,000 lying around, I’ve got a tip for how you can turn that into $7,000: Bet on Gavin Newsom to be the 2024 Democratic nominee for president.
The California governor’s odds right now are +600, but they’ll be dropping fast after Labor Day, and especially early next year when President Biden announces he’s not going to run for reelection.
So many signs point to Mr. Biden bailing — including the fact that when Americans hear the president’s name, they think “old,” “outdated,” “retire,” “elderly,” “aging,” “senile” and “dementia,” according to an Associated Press poll released Tuesday.
Please. He can’t go.
First, Mr. Biden’s got no campaign up and running. In this day and age, candidates start running the day after Election Day (albeit quietly, lining up donors, building an operation).
There are just over 400 days until Election Day 2024, and Mr. Biden has hardly built a team.
A skeleton crew of campaign staffers is working in Mr. Biden’s home state of Delaware, but there is next to no operation in early voting states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
“As of last quarter, he had just four people on the payroll, all working out of the party offices,” Fox News reported.
What’s more, his team hasn’t even announced a 2024 headquarters. Weird — and unprecedented.
Second, Mr. Biden’s deep-pocketed donors from 2020 aren’t necessarily backing him in ’24. Sure, he can be the nominee if he likes — and the Democratic National Committee has already announced that it won’t hold debates this time around — but that doesn’t mean the cash will just pour in.
Earlier this month, Politico headlined a piece: “‘Whistling past the graveyard’: Dem fear grows over massive grassroots fundraising hit.” Mr. Biden is down $30 million compared with this point in the 2020 cycle, and contributors are down 32% from four years ago.
Which takes us to No. 3, the “enthusiasm gap.”
“No matter what the White House wants to say, you take a survey and a huge plurality of Democratic voters don’t even want him to run again,” a national Democratic strategist who was “granted anonymity to speak frankly” told Politico. “There’s really an enthusiasm gap that I think is their central challenge.”
Mr. Biden is a hard sell. America’s going to hell in a handbasket — soaring inflation, unaffordable housing, escalating crime, rampant drug abuse and overdose deaths, a mental health epidemic, a student loan crisis, skyrocketing federal debt (it rises $1 million every 24 seconds), an absurdly expensive health care system, wealth inequality, a crumbling infrastructure, illegal immigrants storming across the border, unrestrained price gouging, mounting poverty and homelessness — and Mr. Biden is busy falling down a lot.
Who’s jazzed about this guy?
Then there’s No. 4. Unlike his former boss, former President Barack Obama, Mr. Biden has scandals galore. He’s got his son Hunter, the recovering drug addict with ties to corruption in Ukraine. He’s got a slew of classified documents found — well, all over — and this week, it emerged that the National Archives and Records Administration is in possession of nearly 5,400 emails, electronic records and documents that potentially show Mr. Biden using a pseudonym during his vice presidency. That can’t be good.
Back to Gavin. He’s 55 — not 80 — and viewed as a wannabe setting up a 2028 run, but then, he is set to debate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is busy running for the Republican nomination.
“Absolutely. I’m game. Let’s get it done. Just tell me when and where. We’ll do it,” Mr. DeSantis told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
No date has been set, but it could be in the second week of November.
Over to Vice President Kamala Harris. She can’t run. At one point this year, she was less popular than the ever-unpopular Vice President Dick Cheney. Ms. Harris has been hovering in the low 30s, and that doesn’t put you in the White House.
The Democrats this time around have a very thin bench, and Mr. Newsom — weak as he is — could be the party’s best shot.
But let’s be clear: Mr. Biden won’t go in ’24. He can’t. He’s not even bothering to make it look like he’s going. And frankly, he hates Kamala. My guess is he’s already made a deal with Mr. Newsom to run in his place, damn Ms. Harris.
And that’ll set up a fantastic race: the way California does things versus the way Florida does things.
That won’t be pretty. But it will set up a very stark choice.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on X, formerly known as Twitter, @josephcurl.
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