Around The Globe . . . Political Races Have Resemblances Even While U.S. Heads Into 2024 Vote

By DEXTER DUGGAN

PHOENIX — The major Madrid daily newspaper El Pais posted an article on continuing political troubles across the ocean in Mexico headlined, “The PRI’s boundless agony,” using the initials of the political party that ruled Mexico for most of the twentieth century, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, although it finally lost the presidency to a competing conservative party, the PAN, in 2000.
The subheadline on El Pais’ article posted on June 4 elaborated that the PRI was “Divided, cornered and with less power than ever, Mexico’s historic party is barely standing….”
I sent the article to an Arizona political consultant I know, Reymundo Torres, without expecting him to comment on it, but Torres replied that it showed more of the same old political advantage-seeking.
“It’s all a shell game,” Torres said. “No different than when Fox and Calderon were in power.”
Vicente Fox was the candidate of the National Action Party (PAN) who broke the PRI’s grip on presidential power in the 2000 election. Calderon, also with the PAN, succeeded Fox as president in 2006, but that position was reclaimed by PRIista Enrique Pena Nieto in 2012.
Mexican presidents serve one six-year term.
Torres added, “The old bureaucratic PRIistas just ran to the PAN’s open arms while they were running things. In the end, nothing improves, the same people continue to benefit from the same chaos but with a different party label in front of it.”
The current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, representing yet another party, the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), won the next election, in 2018.
El Pais’ article about the PRI’s continued decline referred to MORENA recently beating it for the governorship of the State of Mexico after the PRI held that office for 94 years.
Political consultant Torres, who lives southeast of Phoenix, is American-born but was sent by his parents to attend university in Mexico City, to learn about his heritage and study the Spanish language. He once told me that when he traveled to do business in Mexico, people thought he was from Mexico City because of his accent — where he learned Spanish.
If Mexican politics with its rises and falls doesn’t sound so different from U.S. political warfare, might that be because of inherent similarities no matter the nation — even allowing for regions’ and countries’ peculiarities?
Whether you watch videos of election results being announced in Canada, France, Italy, Spain, the UK, Germany, Greece, Israel, India, Japan, Australia or elsewhere, there are coalitions, sympathies, issues, motivations, and other factors all leading toward victory or defeat.
In a way, the U.S. presidential election on the Republican side for 2024 resembles our 2016, with an array of candidates all announcing.
A major difference this time is that one candidate, conservative Donald Trump, actually had served as president and is far and away leading in the opinion polls, scoring in the 40s and 50s while second-place conservative Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is in the 20s, followed by much smaller portions of the total for other GOP hopefuls, mainly proclaiming themselves conservative.
If Trump’s foes truly hope to defeat him, their efforts are being splintered by the crowded field.
On the other hand, not a single primary election or official indicator of preferences has been held at this early date. Perhaps the first few tests of voting popularity would serve to indicate who the non- and anti-Trump voters could coalesce behind.
Some of the candidates with small polling numbers do honor to the GOP’s positive messages of self-achievement and accomplishment, such as U.S. Sen. Tim Scott and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, an enormous difference with the Democratic Party’s campaign appeals to dependency, despair, resentment, rage, and wokeism.
If, say, Scott or Ramaswamy somehow ended up facing off against Joe Biden in 2024 — instead of becoming seasoned for subsequent battles — either of them would wipe the floor in debates with the befuddled old race-baiter who used to brag of his Democratic segregationist-senator friends, before he chose to flip-flop and bray that conservative Republicans are “semi-fascists.”
Yes, I said “wipe the floor in debates” against Biden because, these days, after debates are over — if Biden even agrees to have them this time — who can feel confident about how much of a fair election there would be with Democrat vote-manipulators primed to do their worst?
Even if the eventual GOP presidential nominee goes into the 2024 general election with what appear to be overwhelming credentials against Biden or maybe substitute nominee Kamala Harris, we’ve seen that mystifying things can occur. Look no further than the GOP mid-terms “red wave” that dissipated in 2022. But did it dissipate or was it criminally drained away?
We’ve heard that some Republican candidates allegedly have been lacking in quality. But when we view leading Democrat politicians actually holding office who are half-dead, half-demented or some of both, we see that candidate quality matters for nothing. Seizing and holding power is all that counts to them.
Do the names Biden, Vice President Harris, U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein sound familiar for starters?
Trump clearly believes he was cheated of a deserved second term in the White House beginning in 2021 by the Biden gang, and there are sufficient reasons to understand that Trump isn’t simply a sore loser for reasoning this way.
However, it probably wouldn’t improve the GOP’s chances for presidential victory in 2024 if somehow Trump loses the nomination but decides he’ll split opposition to Biden by running as a third-party candidate.
On the other hand, what about some other key factors such as the tragic Russian war with Ukraine, if it’s still underway? Biden clearly has been lost about how the U.S. can or should deal with it, while DeSantis, if he should be the GOP nominee, might be viewed as lacking the necessary clout early-on for such an international dispute.
Trump, however, has said he’d get negotiations started quickly. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who must go to sleep laughing every night over pathetic Biden, likely would react differently to a newly reinstalled tough-guy President Trump.
Who knows? If there’s a half-way honest 2024 election and voters are fragmented, Trump still might be able to come out on top, unlikely or not.

Why Trump Struggles

The Wanderer asked three sources about different aspects of the Trump candidacy, including the third-party possibility, his abrasive treatment of some other people, and potential clout regarding ending the Ukraine war.
National conservative commentator Quin Hillyer said on June 4: “Donald Trump acts as if the Republican nomination is his by right, but he has done nothing to deserve it. He has led Republicans to defeat after defeat, while putting his own vice president’s life at risk and dishonoring the office that he holds.
“He cares only about himself” Hillyer said, “and voters should move on to any one of the several well-qualified, extremely competent conservatives who can actually get a lot more done than Donald Trump ever will.”
Conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard, who favors DeSantis, said it was “tough to predict” whether Trump might run third-party.
Republican National Committee “rules to participate in the debates include a provision that you pledge to support the party’s eventual nominee, but Trump has indicated he prefers to skip the debates if possible, so he may never have to sign such a pledge,” Querard said. “Of course, the issue will get bigger and bigger until he makes a promise one way or another, but that doesn’t mean he’ll keep the promise.
“So I’d say there is a decent chance (30 to 45 percent) that he would run independent if he does not secure the nomination,” Querard said, “but if I had to place a real wager on it, I’d bet no, only because the process of losing the nomination would be relatively miserable for him to go through and he shouldn’t want to run a suicide mission as a third-party candidate after that.
“Not sure I can add anything to the topic of Trump treating people badly, even his own people,” Querard added. “That’s been known since at least 2016 and confirmed countless times since then. It just has never mattered to those who adore him and it likely never will.
“But it is another reason why Trump struggles with other large groups of voters who otherwise would vote for the Republican nominee, especially over someone like Biden,” he said.

America First

Northern California conservative commentator Barbara Simpson said on June 5: “Would Trump run as a third-party candidate? Nothing he would do would surprise me. He believes he is THE man for the presidency and will do all he can to get the party nomination.
“Without it, he would run anyway, and probably win,” Simpson said. “As for his clout in foreign negotiations — as I said, nothing about him surprises me. He does have the clout because of his tough tone and international contacts. He could provide what Biden doesn’t — confidence in American superiority. He puts America first, and Americans like that.”