We are now less than a year away from the November 2024 US elections. Let’s start with Congress before moving to the presidential contest. As a good many readers will know the Democrats currently hold a 51-49 advantage in the US Senate – the US being the only democracy on the planet where the upper house (with obviously fewer democratic credentials) is more important, more powerful and more prestigious than the lower house, such that just about any member of the House of Representatives would chew off his or her own arm to get elected into the Senate. But only a few days ago West Virginia’s long-time Democrat Senator Joe Manchin announced that he would not be running for re-election to the Senate next year. That virtually assures the Republicans of a Senate seat pick-up. Why? Because West Virginia is arguably the state that is the most Republican-voting in the whole of the US, Utah possibly giving it a run for that title. Only the incredible personal following of Manchin has kept him winning in West Virginia. But I suspect that even Manchin realised his chances next year were on the low side.  Take the incumbent Manchin out of the picture and you come as close to a dead certain Republican Senate seat pick-up as human prognostications allow.

That would make the Senate a 50-50 split. But Republicans are also favoured, about 3-1, to defeat the Democrat incumbent in South Dakota (another lopsidedly Republican voting state where it is becoming harder and harder to win as a Democrat, even an incumbent). Oh, and the Republicans are favoured to flip Ohio as well. Solidly favoured. They have less good, but plausible, shots in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona and (if a Republican wave comes) even Michigan. Meantime no Republican incumbent up for re-election next year is a current underdog. They’re all favoured to win. Remember, only one-third of Senate seats are contested every two years. There’s a lot of luck as regards which ones happen to be contested in any particular election. In 2020 the seats in play favoured the Democrats. Next year, the Senate arithmetic favours the Republicans and does so noticeably. The most optimistic, yet still plausible, hope for the Joe Biden party looks to be a 50-50 Senate – which means whichever side takes the White House controls the Senate because the Vice President gets the deciding vote. But if you were betting your own money, you’d definitely be betting on Republican control of the Senate after next year’s November election. Even visceral Democrats would bet that way if their mortgages were at stake. In fact, the Republicans are in my view less likely to retain the House of Representatives than they are to take back the Senate. And I mean that comparison to show just how likely their flipping the Senate is.

That takes us to the Presidential contest. If you were to believe the legacy media Trump’s chances next year are fleetingly small. I think that’s wrong. First off, he is so far ahead of all his Republican challengers that it would take some sort of Transit of Venus event for him to lose the Republican nomination. I really like Ron DeSantis. But his campaign has been weak, at best.  Nikki Haley has zero chance of winning.  She’s establishment Republican through and through and the party base basically loathes their own party establishment. Haley can’t even break into double figures. For over a year now I’ve had bets that Trump would win the nomination with various Republican-leaning and Democrat-leaning friends.  No one is taking my bet any more. Put bluntly, if you’re banking on Trump not being the Republican nominee you’re deluding yourself. (Biden, though, is a very different matter. The Democrats realise he’s a big liability. Their dilemma flows from the identity politics to which they have sold their soul. Get rid of Biden and how do you not go to the black woman Kamala Harris? But she is so staggeringly unpopular that Trump, or anyone else, would trounce her.)

Also remember that Trump doesn’t need to win over those who voted Democrat in 2020. In fact, such is the polarisation in the US that I don’t see that happening much. Not many people who near-instinctively have been hating or loving Trump (or Biden) are going to have Damascene conversions, even in the privacy of the ballot box. But voting is voluntary in the US. Trump doesn’t need Democrat voters to flip he just needs 2020 Biden voters to stay at home in 2024 because of the woeful job Biden has done – and remember that Trump only lost the 2020 electoral college by about 40,000 votes all up in the right states. Yes, there are in my view big problems with the incredible looseness of some US states’ voting laws (which can include third-party ballot harvesting, unsolicited postal ballots and – for this native Canadian it seems obvious you should need to show ID to vote because you do in Canada, but I know Australia has this last one too – no voter ID). These were made worse by some unelected state judges’ rulings in response to Covid back in 2020. But to some extent those are now facts on the ground and the Republicans are going to have to play the ballot harvesting, etc game too.

Again, though, never once in the lead-up to 2020 did Trump have a lead in the polls or did he become the betting favourite (until late on election night). He made it a razor-thin result from five or six points back in the polls. Yet this time around, right now, Trump is even with or beating Biden in polls even by left-wing pollsters. Bloomberg’s latest poll has Trump ahead in all the swing states – Georgia (+7), Arizona (+4), Pennsylvania (+3), Nevada (+3), Wisconsin (+1) and North Carolina (+9). Polls aren’t destiny. We all know that. But Trump has never – not in 2016 and not in 2020 – been doing this well at this stage before. The great and the good are beside themselves.

Meantime the Democrats and their Department of Justice have been weaponising the law against their main political opponent. It’s a disgrace. Not one of these charges would have been brought against Trump the private citizen or against any Democrat. Professors Turley and Dershowitz, both Democrats, have been scathing about this lawfare. But with each new charge Trump’s poll results go up. It’s as though your regular voters – the sort of battlers who broke massively for No in our Voice referendum – can see this is all Third World lawfare. Heck, the very same Democrat law enforcement people who televised live on TV the raids on Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate (‘for the public interest’) now want to keep the TVs out of the Washington DC courtroom bogus Trump trial (‘not in the public interest anymore’).  Trump and the legacy press want the TVs in, a very odd alliance, to show the punters what’s going on – which no longer is high on the prosecutor’s agenda.

My final summary: we’re going to get another presidential election with Trump on the ballot. And right now he’s in way better shape than he has ever been before. If, by some miracle, he develops a bit of discipline then look out all you Trump Derangement Syndrome victims.