Donald Trump is running again for president in 2024. He’s likely but not certain to win the primaries and the situation should clarify by mid-2023. If he is the nominee, he’s likely to lose, although much will depend on how events unfold. His entry could diminish the prospects of whoever the nominee is from the primary mudslinging that inflicts grievous wounds on all candidates. Conversely, should Trump be flailing by mid-2023 and Ron DeSantis announces, the party’s prospects will brighten for the White House, Senate and House in 2024.

Trump launches his bid from a position of weakness after the anticipated red wave fizzled out. There was no real buzz around the announcement. As a three-time loser (2018, 2020 and 2022), he is vulnerable to the taunt that Republicans are ‘tired of losing’. Chris Christie also believes the party must engage in the fight to convince Republicans that ‘A vote for Trump is a vote for a Democratic president’. He repels more voters than he attracts, particularly among the independents who determine elections. Exit polls showed 32:19 per cent voted to oppose/support Biden and 28:16 per cent to oppose/support Trump. Should Biden and/or Trump be the nominees, each would start off as a net drag on their party’s prospects with the negativity for both, I suspect, increasing as time goes on.

Major donors have already signalled a shift away to younger rivals. In contrast to Trump, the 44-year-old DeSantis has shown conservatives how to fight to win. A post-mid-term YouGov poll showed DeSantis leading Trump among Republicans 42:35 per cent – a drop of 20 per cent for Trump in less than a fortnight. Another poll shows him badly trailing DeSantis in the three early voting states: 34:59 in New Hampshire, 31:59 in Iowa, 42:53 in Nevada; and by 20 and 26 points in Georgia and Florida. Trump may have calculated his candidacy will shield him from mounting legal troubles. In reality, by foisting losing candidates in winnable seats, he helped to preemptively destroy the most effective shield of a Republican-controlled Senate.

Justin Hart, a Trump voter in 2016, argues that under Trump, US lockdowns morphed from the promised 15 days to stop the spread into an open-ended nightmare. This ‘should disqualify him for a second term’. By contrast, after an initial brief embrace of lockdown, DeSantis created Florida as a refuge of sanity in a world gone Covid crazy. He engaged in wide-ranging consultations with a broad range of experts, asked the right questions, evaluated economic and social alongside health costs and harms, wasn’t infected by other states’ herd-like panic, and successfully resisted pressure from Biden, Fauci and the media braying he was about to turn Florida into America’s killing fields. The results are in and strongly vindicate him, as does his remarkable triumph from a razor-thin majority in 2018 to colouring Florida from pale pink to ruby red with a landslide victory this year. Florida’s age-adjusted Covid metrics are better than most states and it avoided many of the economic, educational and social harms whose bills are coming due in lockdown-friendly jurisdictions.

His leadership and integrity demonstrated on Covid have also been on display in the culture wars. More than anyone else, DeSantis has harnessed seething rage on the hot-button issues of race, religion, gender and sexuality and won much-publicised fights, including with Disney Corp. Expanding on his victory speech, Florida is not just where ‘woke goes to die’, but also lockdowns, masks and vaccine mandates, with priority given to parental choice and individual responsibility. None of this would have amounted to much without the parallel demonstration of competent and effective governance. He has proven the equal of Trump in strength of personality and willingness to fight the good fight, the superior in intellectual prowess and scientific understanding, and the more skilled at policy smarts and top-level appointments. Plus he comes without the manifest character flaws and baggage.

Trump could be hoist on his own petard well before he has to face DeSantis. His candidacy will bring repeated reminders of the sleaze, chaos and riots that most Americans want to put behind them. His obvious jealousy of DeSantis’s popularity may propel him to say obnoxious things that will turn off many Republicans, even among his base and especially female voters. The much younger DeSantis comes with a smart and attractive wife and three cute kids.

US presidential elections are the most internationally consequential of all, yet it’s hard to see they would pass the test of international best practice of being free and fair. The gold standard is the secret ballot in a secure setting free of coercion and opportunities for rigging votes and counts. US elections are anything but. Mail-in voting has expanded enormously but, along with ballot harvesting, is more vulnerable to mistakes, manipulation and tampering than in-person voting in designated polling stations with scrutineers from all parties to observe voting and counting. There are multiple pathways through which, and multiple points at which, the machinery can be corrupted.

The world’s oldest and most powerful democracy could learn much from the world’s biggest democracy on how to do elections. India has the world’s most efficient, effective and credible election machinery that does a brilliant job of organising and conducting elections, counting votes and certifying results under the most challenging circumstances. The last federal election was conducted in seven staggered phases from 11 April–19 May 2019. Of the 912 million eligible voters, over 600 million voted in one million polling booths. Counting began and was concluded in one day on 23 May. Modi’s BJP was confirmed as having won 303 of the 545 seats in the lower House. In the US, until the turn of the century, we would know the overall House and Senate outcomes on election day but now we wait, and wait, and wait. Covid restrictions gave Democrats the opportunity and the alibi to dramatically expand the menu of voting to include mail-in votes, universal absentee ballots and unmanned (or should that be unpersonned?) drop boxes. Regardless of which party wins, the big loser is American democracy with declining trust in the process and the legitimacy of the outcomes. Trump lost in 2020 by a mere 44,000 votes across three states. According to 2022 exit polls, of the 35 per cent of American voters who still believe Biden’s 2020 victory was illegitimate, 93 per cent are Republicans. This is not good either for the health of US democracy or for US leadership of the ‘free world’.