Steve Corbin is Professor Emeritus of Marketing, University of Northern Iowa
Here we are – one year before the Nov. 5, 2024 election – and a recent Pew Research Center poll reveals 65% of Americans say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics. Fifty-five percent feel angry, let alone disgusted.
Furthermore, 63% of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the candidates who have emerged so far. Most Americans are critical of the role of money in politics and the inter- and intra-party campaign fighting that starts way too early in the election cycle.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had the same pre-election campaign starting date as Canada (11 weeks), Mexico (90 days) or France (2 weeks)? Tradition held that people seeking any office didn’t start their campaign until the year of the election. Jimmy Carter (D-GA) broke the accepted protocol when he announced his 1976 presidential candidacy on Dec. 12, 1974.
Pundits are already making predictions about the presidential, Senate and House outcome. Let’s preview their pre-election analysis.
Presidential Election
The non-partisan and independent `Road to 270’ 2024 presidential election map claims the Democratic Party has already sewed up 241 electoral college votes, needing only 29 more to reach the 270 magical number. The GOP is touted to have 235 votes in their pocket, 35 electoral votes short of winning the presidency.
The Democrats can remain in the White House if states in just one of these six different scenarios `vote blue’: 1) Pennsylvania and Georgia, 2) Pennsylvania and Arizona, 3) Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, 4) Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin, 5) Georgia, Arizona and Nevada and 6) Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada.
For the Republican Party, they only have five `vote red’ winning combinations to flip the presidency back to GOP-controlled: 1) Pennsylvania and Georgia, 2) Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin, 3) Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, 4) Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada and 5) Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.
Registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will be inundated with the D and R presidential candidates’ time, money and respective disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, door-to-door persuasion, media saturation and political campaign energy. But, voters in the other 45 states are not off-the-hook.
Senate Election
Currently the Democrats’ Senate caucus is composed of 51 members (48 Democrats and three independents). Forty-nine members make up the GOP’s Senate. Of the 33 Senate races in 2024, 20 Democrats, ten Republicans and three independents are seeking re-election.
The independent and non-partisan Cook Political Report (CPR) feels there are three major “toss-up” elections: 1) Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema (independent), 2) Ohio’s Sherrod Brown (D) and 3) West Virginia’s Joe Manchin (D). Legal issues may endanger Bob Menendez (D-NJ) returning to D.C. for his fourth term-of-office.
Don’t be surprised by the Democrats losing control of the Senate.
House of Representatives Election
Of the 435 House elections in 2024, CPR thinks the Democrats and Republicans will each win over 200 seats, but there are 24 races classified as deadlocked.
Ten currently-controlled Democrat seats in the nail-biter category include: Colorado’s Yadira Caraveo; Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin; North Carolina’s Kathy Manning, Wiley Nickel and Jeff Jackson; New Mexico’s Gabe Vasquez; Ohio’s Emilia Sykes; Pennsylvania’s Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright; and Washington’s Marie Perez.
Fourteen Republicans are in cliff-hanger races: Arizona’s David Schweikert and Juan Ciscomani; California’s John Duarte, Mike Garcia and Ken Calvert; Colorado’s Lauren Boebert; Florida’s John Rutherford; Louisiana’s Julia Letlow; New Jersey’s Thomas Kean; New York’s Anthony D’Esposito, Mike Lawler, Marcus Molinaro and Brandon Williams; and Oregon’s Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
Legal woes may affect George Santos’ (R-NY) congressional longevity. Also, Alabama’s new congressional map puts Barry Moore (R) and Jerry Carl’s (R) re-election in jeopardy.
Don’t be shocked if the Republicans lose control of the House.
If we’re already exhausted, disgusted, angry and dissatisfied, imagine how we’ll feel come Nov. 5, 2024, especially if there’s a claim of a rigged election – despite multitude of evidence otherwise -- that we’ll continue to hear about until 2028?
Voters may well be in need of a psycho-therapeutic program to regain control of their lives; check local listings for an anger management class nearby.
Sources
- (270 To Win news release) 2024 presidential election interactive map, https://www.270towin.com, Oct. 3, 2023
- (Pew Research Center news release) Americans’ dismal view of the nation’s politics, Pew Research Center, Sept. 19, 2023
- Amy Walter, 2024 CPR Senate race ratings, The Cook Political Report, Sept. 26, 2023
- Amy Walter, 2024 CPR House race ratings, The Cook Political Report, Sept. 27, 2023
- Amy Walter, 2024 CPR Electoral College ratings, The Cook Political Report, July 27, 2023
- Danielle Kurtzleben, Why are U.S. elections so much longer than other countries?, National Public Radio, Oct. 21, 2015
- Joe Lieberman, No Labels won’t help Trump, The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 13, 2023
- Alexander Willis and Mary Sell, Supreme Court ruling means special session on new map, potential shake-up in 2024, Alabama Daily News, June 8, 2023
- Fredreka Schouten, Redistricting fights in these 10 states could determine which party controls the US House, CNN Politics, Oct. 25, 2023
Disclosure: Steve is a non-paid freelance opinion editor and guest columnist contributor (circa 2013) to 172 newspapers in 32 states who receives no remuneration, funding or endorsement from any for-profit business, not-for-profit organization, political action committee or political party.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.