The heighten-the-contradictions counterfactual
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Ed Kilgore says that, knowing that Trump would win in 2024, it would have been better had he won in 2020 instead:
A reelected Trump would not have had four years to plan a scorched-earth second term with audacious power grabs far beyond anything he tried from 2017 to ’21. While he might have been more successful than Biden in limiting border crossings from 2021 to ’25, he also would have probably been unable to muster the political support in or beyond his party for the mass-deportation effort he’s now undertaking.
A reelected Trump would have been in office when the Supreme Court majority he created during his first term overturned Roe v. Wade, making his responsibility for that disaster clearer to the whole country. The 2022 midterms would have been a referendum on cumulative disgruntlement with Trump; second-term midterms are almost always calamitous for the party of the incumbent. Had Trump come out of 2020 with control of either congressional chamber, he would have almost certainly lost it in 2022.
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Most of all, a Trump reelection in 2020 would have made the 2024 election in whose shadow we stand a very different proposition. There would have been no Trump campaign of vengeance to rouse the MAGA faithful and desensitize the public to his failings. His heir apparent would have been a two-term vice-president, Mike Pence, a milquetoast low-charisma politician who would have almost certainly attracted at least as large a field of challengers as Trump himself did. There would have been intense wrangling over the future of the GOP, of conservatism, and of Trump’s own MAGA movement (much as there will likely be in 2028). Republicans might have entered the general election “in disarray,” knowing that no major party had won three straight presidential elections since the 1980s.
The effect of this scenario on the Democrats of 2024 would have been even more dramatic. A defeated Joe Biden would have gracefully ended his political career in 2021. Kamala Harris would have suffered two debilitating losses in the 2020 presidential cycle, once as a presidential nomination candidate and once as a veep nominee; no one would have considered her a serious candidate for 2024. Democrats could have had a relatively harmonious nominating contest, finally overcoming the divisions the Clinton-Sanders and Biden-Sanders battles reflected, uniting around an agenda for undoing the damage Trump had done to the country. The Democratic Party would not be defending record inflation, uncontrolled immigration, too much “wokeness,” a mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan, and all sorts of other problems. No one would be writing exposés about an aging Democratic president losing his grip but hanging grimly on to power. Democrats could have managed a fresh start and a likely 2024 win without losing ground with key constituencies or earning the bitter enmity of so many unhappy young people.
The counter-factual narrative is instructive. The alignment of a Democratic administration with all sorts of terrible events, some beyond any president’s power to control, made a Trump comeback doubly possible by making his own first term seem better than it was at the time and by making him the lesser of evils. And now the Trump comeback has led to horrific policies that will be exceptionally hard to reverse; a government and a judiciary full of deeply entrenched MAGA loyalists who have been rewarded for lawlessness; a Republican Party devoted to hatefulness and extremism; and a Democratic Party, with no clear sense of direction, full of bitter recriminations over what went wrong last year. Would it have been worse had Trump won in 2020? I don’t think so.
I don’t think it’s quite this simple. If you assume that Democrats not only win the House but the Georgia Senate elections in 2020 (the first probably happens with an 80,000 battleground vote shit to Trump, but Purdue might not have needed a runoff election so I’m less sure about the latter), this limits the potential damage. There’s also the serious complication of what happens of Trump tries to run for a third term, or what happens if the Republican candidate loses in 2024 with Trump still in charge of the executive branch. There are too many complexities to be confident in any counterfactual. There’s also not much you can do with it — since the best-case scenario is Trump not taking office ever again, it would have been crazy not to want to win in 2020.
But to play the parlor game I will agree that it would probably have been better for the Democrats to win the White House in 2024 than 2020 if they could only win one and assuming they do win one and would be able to assume office in 2025.