Before reading further, familiarize yourself with the following introductory piece:
Link to Four Courses Orientation
And then, review the first course of action, Scenario 1: Trump Squeaker, presented two week in these pages, the second, Scenario 2: Trump Blowout, presented last week, and the third, Scenario 3: 2020 Redux, from earlier this week.
What follows is the final of four scenarios I consider most likely to occur regarding the 2024 presidential election. This is an even more dangerous scenario for the Republic than the previous one, which is a virtual do-over of the 2020 outcome.
Scenario 4
The 1861 Scenario
The fourth scenario, which falls under the two most likely scenarios outlining a Biden “victory,” recognizes Scenario 3 is not going to be believed by the public and allows the bull to charge the cape, running up equally unbelievable margins and framing the bull for the cheat, triggering mass confusion and a contingent election.
The previous scenario, Scenario 3: 2020 Redux, describes a repeat of the 2020 race, in which an apparent Trump victory is turned back by mail-in balloting abuse, unlimited time to alter the count, and a non-stop media onslaught to justify the upending of more than a century of established trends, indicators, bellwethers, and predictors. The first point made under “Reasons It Wouldn’t Happen” goes as follows:
No one will believe it. If those at the levers of power have expended so much energy to conceal and justify the results of the 2020 race, then this one will make that election look like a display of national unity and togetherness, back when no major party candidate could achieve more than 82 million ballots and turnouts were low in comparison.
Simply put, it will take more than 90-95 million Biden ballots to slick out the numbers nationally, and numbers in the decisive states that far surpass the ability for two parties to climb in states that aren’t growing - namely in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A more nuanced approach to preventing Trump from taking the White House would require using procedure, media assistance, and the art of projection to cover up actions that are detrimental to the continuation of this Republic, which supposedly functions on consent of the governed and the belief that our representatives govern with our interests in mind.
North Carolina plays a pivotal role in this scenario, as does the fact that we’ve never had matching presidential maps from one election to the next; therefore, with more than two centuries of precedent informing my assessment, I believe the 2024 map will differ from the 2020 map, even if only slightly. North Carolina and Texas are the only two states that give me pause as to whether they can be Georgia’d (snatched when not expected, and when we aren’t looking for them to flip), and of Trump’s 2020 certified slate, North Carolina is not only most likely to get snatched, but is actively being targeted by the Biden campaign despite every indicator suggesting Trump should win it with ease.
That means in order to have a different map from 2020, it will be Biden states going to Trump, serving the dual purpose of getting a lot of corrupt officials off the hook, but also lending legitimacy to the phrase, “see, our elections are fair, Trump won Arizona and even flipped a state that has been blue for two decades!”
If Trump holds North Carolina, which appears likely, he can be allowed to take both Arizona and Georgia, getting the Maricopa Board and Brad Raffensperger out of the conversation for the first time in four years. Those states, unlike the midwestern Trump belt, are Republican states, full of random Republican lunch groups, book clubs, Bible studies, and women’s organizations. They were ripped away from Trump with no statistical justification in 2020 and having them back will render many arguments moot for what follows here. There is even room for Trump to have Nevada, which is moving toward him with major momentum thanks to his surge with the Latino working class, which makes up more than a quarter of the state’s population. Trump would be dangerously close to a majority but, assuming the blue wall holds, just short, and the margins in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada would need to be kept within a few points and blamed on minorities coming Trump’s way. That scenario looks like this:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Captain K's Corner to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.