Here’s The Single Most Important Question 2024 GOP Presidential Candidates Must Answer
Only by competing and winning under a rotten system anathema to conservatives will there ever be an opportunity to dismantle that system
Here’s The Single Most Important Question 2024 GOP Presidential Candidates Must Answer
There is one fundamental question that any candidate vying for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 2024 must answer — but that as of yet has gone largely unaddressed, at least publicly, as the field spars over significant but ultimately subordinate issues.
The question is this: How will you win the general election under the present voting system?
An inability to answer this question clearly, compellingly, and convincingly imperils Republican odds of retaking the White House, no matter how favorable their prospects might look come next November. It is incumbent on anyone who wants to earn the Republican presidential nomination to answer this question at the outset, and to operate accordingly.
Today at The Federalist I lay out this argument, and provide some thoughts on what a comprehensive Republican plan to win in 2024 ought to look like.
As I write in part:
In an ideal world, such a plan would begin with an effort to lobby state legislatures to pass a battery of election integrity-strengthening laws seeking to restore voting, to the greatest extent possible, to the standard of single-day, in-person, and with identification; purge voter rolls of ineligible names; provide maximum transparency and visibility into the voting process for observers, challengers, and the candidates; facilitate real-time arbitration over contested ballots and irregularities, and clear remedies for broader alleged malfeasance; empower state authorities to pursue vote fraud; and impose utterly crippling criminal penalties on anyone who engages in it.
Beyond a legislative effort to ensure end-to-end election integrity from delivery of ballot to vote-counting, candidates must lay out a realistic roadmap for success by internalizing lessons of recent election cycles and forthrightly recognizing Republicans’ strengths and weaknesses. They must determine how to optimally deploy finite resources to triumph in a bloody political war, and play on whatever advantages Republicans may have.
To prepare such a plan, candidates should seek to identify: Democrats’ most effective and decisive strategies and tactics in recent election cycles; what Democrats will do to improve upon these efforts; Republicans’ greatest strategic and tactical failures and successes in recent election cycles; Republican advantages yet to be exploited; and the most significant election integrity-eroding laws, policies, and practices on a state-by-state basis in recent election cycles.
Read the whole thing here.
The Single Most Important Question . . . is a sobering delineation of the problems Republicans face going into the 2024 election and an outline of appropriate key elements to the creation of a plan to win. All of the main elements articulated in the commentary need to be pursued and analyzed with all deliberate speed.
However one that is missing is the critical need for Republicans currently in office to be the vanguard by showing they can be depended on to do what they campaigned to do on key issues of the day and to articulate the extreme dangers Democrats have put the country in. Not doing so undermines rank and file Republican enthusiasm and continues the indifference felt by no-party people that become prey to Democrat messaging particularly in their enclaves resulting in them voting for Democrats either in the voting booth or in the privacy of their home or in response to hectoring by them to vote early by mail.
However to the extent of implementing what we are hearing a lot of as the so-called realist solution -- that the ground game has to focus on ballot harvesting, ballot chasing, or banking of votes à la Democrat tactics -- I see as a money churning, expensive, resource draining, suffering of more tactically productive approaches.
The money necessary to finance paid operatives (Democrats can call on allied organizations with skin in the game in terms of dependent on Democrats in control providing largess from taxpayers) is formidable and the results likely akin to applying a lot of horsepower to spinning tires rather than garnering traction. Here is a link to articles critiquing the vote early by mail zeitgeist some are trying to build, unrealistically:
Republican Ballot Harvesting – Who is going to do it – Who will submit to it – How will it be effectively done
https://veritaspac.com/2023/05/28/republican-ballot-harvesting-who-is-going-to-do-it-who-will-submit-to-it-how-will-it-be-effectively-done/
Oh Kari Lake says it is not ballot harvesting it is “ballot chasing”https://veritaspac.com/2023/06/07/oh-kerry-lake-says-it-is-not-ballot-harvesting-it-is-ballot-chasing/
Dear Mr. Ben,
(please forgive my run on sentences)
While I agree with what you state, & with the 2 gentlemen's comments b4 my own, how do you think the State Legislature's passage of any NEW laws, besides what was already on their books about elections, that they completely ignored, or wrote themselves new rules & regs that never went thru their own State's Constitutional laws which specifically stated that said changes to elections laws may only be carried out by the Legislatures, will change a bleeping thing?? I don't mean to be insulting sir, cause I really like you, but that part of what you state is, to me, akin to all & any new "gun laws"! The only people hurt by any of those useless laws, are We the honest, hard-workin', law abiding People, & not the "criminals".
Our State Swamps of unelected bureaucrats, the Deep State, or whatever nefarious term for Leftists & RINOs you'd like to employ are now so deeply entrenched in our Governmental fabric, that I fear we now only have the last, & only desperate box of the 4 Boxes that We the People are supposed to use to keep our Constitutional Republic strong & true, left to us, as the avenue upon which we will soon be forced to march when we
open & employ those Boxes.
Regards,
Molon Labe