2024 presidential election

Ron DeSantis is doing just fine Is Ron DeSantis a shoo-in for the 2024 Republican nomination or this cycle’s Scott Walker — an overhyped early favorite who flops in dramatic fashion? A lot of very over-caffeinated coverage of the Florida governor seems to assume these are the only two possibilities. Never mind that he still hasn’t announced a presidential bid. Never mind that it is still only April, and we’re still nine months out from anyone actually voting. So far, 2024 punditry has veered from one extreme to the other on DeSantis’s chances.  For at least a month, conventional wisdom has been bearish, largely thanks to polls that show DeSantis stalling in his effort to make inroads against Trump and the internal GOP dynamics around the Trump indictment.

The 2024 presidential election is heating up and with it comes the typical scramble of political consultants trying to hitch wagons to the winning campaign. The hottest gossip right now surrounds the Never Back Down PAC, which will support Florida governor Ron DeSantis in the event of a presidential run and has recently gobbled up some prominent Trump 2020 alumni. One of the key players in any Republican election is Jeff Roe, the head of Axiom Strategies and a top consultant to Senator Ted Cruz during the 2016 election. Axiom, which is one of the three major GOP consulting firms alongside Majority Strategies and Arena, played a major role in Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin's upset over Terry McAuliffe in 2021.

As the song in “Li’l Abner” said, “The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands.”   I wonder if Joe Biden knows the tune?   The treasury says the national debtIs climbing to the skyAnd government expendituresHave never been so highIt makes a fellow get aGleam of pride within his eye,To see how our economy expandsThe country’s in the very best of hands Please note that Joe’s got plenty of help. There are lots of hands building up that debt, opening up our southern border, proselytizing for the girls who think they are boys and vice versa.

The woman with a starring role in perhaps the most talked about campaign ads of both the 2018 and 2022 election cycles wasn’t on the ballot. In both, a politician whose stock has risen as much as anyone’s in the last half decade was happy to let his wife do the talking. Five years ago, Casey DeSantis narrated a thirty-second clip in which she testified to her husband Ron’s admiration for Donald Trump. You’ve probably seen it. “Everyone knows my husband is endorsed by President Trump, but he’s also an amazing dad. Ron loves playing with the kids,” says Casey. The ad cuts to footage of the Republican gubernatorial candidate building a toy wall with one child, reading The Art of the Deal to another, and so on. “People say he’s all Trump,” says Casey.

SVB and the echo of bailout politics There was a back-to-the-noughties feel to events in Washington this morning as Joe Biden sought to calm markets and assuage fears of contagion in the banking system after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in the last few days. Talking the day after regulators announced emergency measures that guaranteed all depositors at Silicon Valley Bank, Biden said that “thanks to the quick action of my administration over the past five days, Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe.” Viewed as a stand-alone case, Biden’s response to a run on America’s sixteenth largest bank after mismanagement left it fatally exposed to higher interest rates is understandable.

New Hampshire Vivek Ramaswamy accepts it: running for president is “a weird thing to do as a thirty-seven-year-old.” The biotech multimillionaire and anti-woke capitalism crusader is a surprise entry into the 2024 Republican primary after announcing on Tucker Carlson’s show on Tuesday. He went straight from Carlson’s Florida studio to early-voting New Hampshire. I arrived in the snow-dusted city of Rochester at 9 a.m. on Wednesday to watch him kick off his first full day of campaigning — and to work out what the author of Woke, Inc. hoped to bring to the race. Around thirty or so were gathered in Potter’s House bakery watching Vivek gear up for his third Fox hit in fourteen hours.