The Human-Crystal-Ball of Politics has Something to Say About the 2024 Democratic Nominee
Tags: 2024, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren

The Human-Crystal-Ball of Politics has Something to Say About the 2024 Democratic Nominee Aleksei Dec 27, 2021·12 min read

Here we are again…

The question of who is running in 2024 has already crossed my mind more than a few times, but seeing the question be asked by my good friend and youth chair of Andrew Yang’s Forward Party, Theo Demel, something inside me snapped and I realized that I had once again be blessed with the gift of prophecy, which shall surely go unappreciated by many a mortal in our age.

If you haven’t been following up to this point (I don’t blame you, I’ve been a prolific writer everywhere except the one platform I have to wax poetic about political musings), I’ve been writing a small handful of articles at this point which predict Democratic party primaries from my comfortable armchair since 2016, and my predictions have almost all come to pass with pretty strong accuracy. I am of course, not a psychic with true prophetic abilities, but frankly you don’t need to be one to see the tides of elections turning and accurately predict the results of a contest in the days and weeks leading up to their actualization. And yet I see so few people dabble in this art who also appear incredibly confused when election results do not meet their expectations, so let’s dive in.

I also want to issue a small disclaimer here as well: I’ve referenced my previous writings here, but at this point some of them are pushing six years of age or I have delisted due to my thoughts at the time no longer accurately reflecting my current opinions. My predictions tend to stand on their own, but the flavor of my delivery leaves something to be desired, such is the nature of writing with a neurodivergent brain.

Because of course they’re still friends in 2021

So, to briefly touch upon the obvious, it is almost without doubt that Trump will be running again in 2024. The Donald has been returning to the public attention with media tours, Fox News appearances, and even a few lighter pep rallies. Perhaps his plans to be the 47th president will be disrupted by some kind of illness or unpredictable accident, but if Trump wants to run again it would be political suicide for any self-respecting Republican politician to attempt to defeat him. If Trump decides not to run for whatever reason, Cruz or DeSantis can slot fairly easily into the slot. But I am going to assume for the rest of this article that Trump is the presumptive nominee of the 2024 Republican party.

This leads us to the Democrats, and the question that inspired my new writings: who do they run? Under any normal circumstance, the obvious answer should be President Joe Biden. The United States hasn’t seen an intentional single-term presidency since technically Lyndon Johnson in the 1960’s, and not for a long time before that either. Biden has also expressed public interest in running again, commenting to the news media that he has no intentions of stepping down after his first term ends. But that’s just the outward-facing optics of it all.

The cynical point of view argues that Biden can’t ever admit his plans to step away from the presidency, even if he intends to do so, for fear of showing weakness and losing the faith of his incredibly slim majority in Congress. In addition, at 78 years old, Joe Biden is the oldest sitting president in US history with every passing day pushing the record just slightly higher. It’s not as though he CAN’T run again, but if he wants to there will be questions about his age. Trump can fake his youthful vitality well, but Biden in interviews ranges on a sliding scale between stuttering and rambling, which is a huge potential liability.

Now of course, I’m going to assume for our purposes here that Biden lives through his term, sees the red flags in his polling numbers, decides to step aside, and doesn’t immediately endorse a successor while doing so. These are a lot of “what ifs” so if in 2024 we end up in one of these alternate timelines (such as one in which Biden steps aside but decides to do so while simultaneously kingmaking Harris) then most of this article will have been for naught, and that’s perfectly alright. I’ve tended to veer away from definitive predictions and steer towards branching timelines of what is most likely. In my 2020 primary prediction, I created different scenarios based on who won in Iowa and New Hampshire, and while this article is going to remain more speculative, I do want to acknowledge that the thread of fate could be severed at any time and send us careening in a wildly different direction.

With this being the case, we’re being offered something of a redux of 2020, without the two biggest players of that year: Bernie and Biden. Biden would presumably be stepping aside at least partly because of age, and Bernie being a year older than Biden would almost certainly sit the contest out for the same reason. Bernie’s age was a major point of contention in 2020, with him suffering from a heart attack mid-campaign and still trucking along with poll numbers surging. But his window of opportunity has passed, and the coalitions that he and Biden both built are now set to do battle once again without their figure heads.

For Biden’s coalition, there is a huge issue brewing in that no single candidate has yet acquired enough of the Infinity Stones necesarry to be, if not a good candidate, at least a good enough candidate. Many of the frontrunners for this role share one particular issue in this regard, that being a sharp decline in their polling likeability. Vice President Harris’ polling numbers have suffered since she took the office and show few signs of reversing course. Secretary Buttigieg might have been a potential alternative to step up to the plate, but try though he might, he and his team never figured out how to raise his polling among African American voters in 2020 above single digits, and those problems have not dissapeared since the election. Other noteworthy faces from 2020 such as Klobuchar and Gilibrand have done very little to substantially rehabilitate their public image since their presidential campaigns tanked, while some have reaffirmed their comittment to political struggles local to their states such as O’Rourke and Abrams. If you had asked me this question a year ago, Andrew Cuomo would have been an easy choice not just because of the positive reaction to his mishandling of Covid in New York, but also because of his display of inteligence in keeping his head down throughout 2020. But all of that is gone now, entirely on his own dismerrits.

Harris has struggled aswering questions she isn’t prepped to expect

In a battle royale, it’s likely that Harris would rise to the top purely on the name recognition of Vice Presidential status alone, but it’s difficult to imagine her record as Vice President of an administration struggling to make inroads with the senate standing toe-to-toe with Trump, who used the majority of his first two years of presidency to undo most of Obama’s legacy with frightening efficiency. There is no single candidate who is quallified, well-liked, and who genuinely wants to run that stands out. If I were picking through this camp with a fine-toothed comb purely for the candidate with the single best chance of victory, I would have to settle on Michele Obama, but the former first lady seems to have very little interest in the role, which is a troubling thought for those who want the Democratic Party to nominate a status quo candidate and win the presidency in the same year.

But if this sounds like good news for the progressive-Sanders camp, I wouldn’t hold your breath just yet. Sanders is one of the only high-profile politicians to walk out of the 2020 bloodbath with his polling and reputation still positive, and yet his legacy remains fairly scattered. Other progressives from the Senate are slim pickings, with Ed Markey at 75 years old and the ex-senator who ran in 2020, Mike Gravel, having since passed away this past year. Perhaps Senator Merkely could finish the job, but he’s not relatively well-known by progressives yet and the prospect of yet another middle-aged white man doesn’t do the new progressive movement justice. If Senator Warnock survives his 2022 Georgia rematch, he might have the magic 2008 Obama energy, but given the extreme clamp down of voting rights in Georgia since Biden carried the state last year, this seems unlikely at best. So let’s scrap that list of Senate prospects for now.

Unfortunately though, the progressive well doesn’t run much deeper. Chair of the House Progressive Caucus, Pramilla Jayapal, should have been a shoe-in for this spot… if she weren’t ineligible based on her Indian birthplace. Barbara Lee is in the same camp as Ed Markey by virtue of being 75 years old, and at a certain point you feel like tearing your hair out because it shouldn’t be this hard to find a single quallified person who wants the job that all of these people have modeled their careers after chasing, but alas. Maybe your angle is with a younger House progressive, but unfortunately most of the Squad lack the “experience” typically required for a sense of legitimacy in running for Presidency. AOC will just barely be old enough to run in 2024 by a matter of months which doesn’t bode well for her chances. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are both immigrants, barred by the birthplace rule. Ayanna Pressley has her eyes on Markey’s Senate seat and likely won’t want to run for president until she has a clearer shot at it. The newer crop of progressives will have only been in Congress for 4 (or fewer) years before making the run if that’s what they want to do, and without some sort of chair, whip, or speakership position, we run into the “quallification” question again.

The one and only House progressive who I could genuinely see taking a run at the presidency in 2024 is California Representative Ro Khanna, who has a pretty decent track record all around and has a great charismatic speaking presence. If you held a gun to my head and told me to pick the one person from the progressive camp I thought had the best shot, this would be my choice considering I think that Khanna balances on the exact same brand of progressivism as Bernie did, where he won’t ever stand up too quickly for fear of showing his cards and alienating part of a tenuous progressive coalition alliance. An alliance, that at this point, is only held together by the fact that Benie Sanders is still around and different competing factions can’t hold up his face and put words in his mouth without risking Bernie’s actual attention.

But if you’ve been paying careful attention, there’s one notable name from 2020 who I haven’t brought up yet, and it’s for the same reason I gave her a uniquely dedicated section in my 2020 prediction article. At age 72, Senator Elizabeth Warren won’t be the spry young candidate of the 2024 field, but also won’t have to worry about ageist complaints about her conduct. In 2020 I gave her a unique section because of her unique position policy-wise, and while she may have jumped the gun just slightly too early in 2020, 2024 could very realistically be her year.

Elizabeth Warren wants to be president, and there is not a doubt about that in my mind. Twice over now, Warren has had the chance to plant her flag in the sand and declare for Sanders, giving him progressive credit from a more moderate crowd, and twice she’s neglected to do so in order to protect the legacy of her image in a potential future presidential run. Warren is undeniably to the left of a 2020 Biden or 2016 Hillary, but is to the right of a 2020 or 2016 Bernie. Every speech she gives and every vote she makes seems calculated like move in the game of political chess to seat herself upon the Iron Throne of politics, and I see this opening you’d better believe she does as well.

A key indication that Warren wants to fill exactly the hole in the administration I’m describing is that she will spend 2020 to 2023 largely keeping her head down from a press point of view while working closely internally with the Biden administration to assure them that if they intend to transition from Biden-Harris to Warren-Harris, close to nothing will change in the day-to-day operations and staus quo. And this has been exactly the case, with the only newsworthy stories about Warren to be small puff pieces concerning her continued work in the Senate, the news that she recently tested positive for Covid-19 (she’ll be fine, her government job has healthcare included) and a small twitter spat with Elon Musk over government subsidies to large corporations. Some politicians are making waves right now, drafting grandiose statements to condemn the likes of Joe Manchin or pining for media attention to express their dislike of new supreme court rulings. Warren has absolutely issued opinions on these matters, but she hasn’t spoken on them as loudly as some of her colleagues have. This isn’t a criticism of Warren or even a bad thing, just an indication that her eyes are watching Biden for the opening that we all fear is inevitable.

And in terms of taking on Trump… well Warren’s biggest advantage in that department is that she can do to Biden what Biden did to Obama. In his 2020 campaign, Biden stripped Obama’s legacy for parts, holding up the good and ignoring the bad. Waren could theoretically do largely the same, taking credit for the successes of Biden’s presidency that passed her desk in the Senate while distancing herself from the PR smears that Biden’s critics have levied over the last few years. The corporate donors of the Democratic Party (think Mark Cuban) wouldn’t be enthusiastic about a Warren presidency, but they would consider it a brighter alternative to anything the progressive camp throws at them, which is owed to Warren’s versatility and her ability to fill the slot of either camp if their side lacks an answer. She zigs when she needs to zig and zags when she needs to zag. This doesn’t always make her the most popular politician with those who notice her inconsistencies, but it does make her savvy with those who look for it in a presidential nominee. And if she really has been spending her Biden years cozying up with every insider in the administration to make them feel safe and warm with her presence, then she might go into 2024 with all the right blessings.

There is only one detracting factor from a Warren run, that being that Warren’s Senate seat is open in 2024, and if she signals a presidential run she’ll want to be DAMN sure she has it in the bag, because she’d have no political office to fall back on. It’s a calculated risk on the part of a politician who always seems to be holding her cards for the one big moment to play them. But hey, what’s a bigger play than the presidency, am I right?

Now all of this is still largely contingent on many base factors. Substituting a Biden for a Warren isn’t an easy task, and if she loses the confidence of those in power at any time, we slide right back into Harris nomination followed by Trump 47. Maybe Biden’s doctors decide he really is fit enough to do this until 2028, and we slog through the Roaring Twenties with a new presidential dog every few months to slap a bandage over terrible polling numbers that aren’t that bad if you just close your eyes and pretend they don’t exist. Or maybe we get the exact opposite, with Harris becoming president much sooner than anticipated but required to run a Ford election strategy as the president that wasn’t voted for the first time around. All of this is speculative, and all of it is likely to change after the 2022 election season, which will probably require its own prediction article on my part as well. But hopefully the few Warren folks who follow me can breathe a sigh of relief: as long as we actually get a race, I think ya girl’s got a huge lead, and it aint really even close.