Who will be our next President? A Democrat. Here’s why

Let’s dust off the crystal ball today and peer into the not-too-distant future.

My political predictions have been good, not great, and predictions reflect what I think will happen, not necessarily what I want to happen.

So I predicted Donald J. Trump would beat Kamala Harris in 2024, and predicted Democrats would capture the House of Representatives in 2026. 

In the Presidential election, I was correct, even though the outcome was not to my liking. Kamala was a lousy candidate and never truly defined who she was (other than a woman of color with a crazy laugh), despite sincere advice I gave her. For free. 

I’m not claiming to be Karnak, but I can usually tell when the light at the end of the tunnel is a locomotive speeding toward me.

I was right about Dems taking the House, but didn’t see their huge win in the Senate. I am happy with that outcome. Why? To send Trump and MAGA to the dust heap of history.

If the Dems make the mistake of going extreme, the voters will punish them. I never bought into the "destruction of democracy” hysteria because our Constitution is too strong. America is a self-correcting democracy that is basically centrist, but swings back and forth from left to right as I have explained in the past. 

The widely pissed-upon polls were generally correct, if anything undercounting Democrats support, as opposed to the more usual undercount of Republicans. 

Yes, that happens, but the majority of good-reputation polls were close to the final outcome. Remember: They don’t predict who will win, just who is ahead at the moment (on the days) the polls are taken. 

The Republican undercount is explainable: Fewer Republicans trust pollsters and may be more likely to lie. That is true with Donald J. Trump, and it was true with Frank L. Rizzo. Some of their supporters were either too ashamed to admit they were voting for them, or just lied for spite.

Whatever the reason, undercounts do happen.

—-

The motto of my blog is that reality shapes my political positions, rather than vice versa. 

Because I am a centrist, I sometimes support conservative ideas, sometimes liberal ideas. And that means I am always disappointing people who are welded to their favorite political party. 

What I have noticed — take it for what you will — is that the Right is more likely to stick around and fight it out, than the Left. Progressives are more likely to walk away than argue.

Why that is true, I don’t know.

I do know I am not imagining it.

I go back a bit to when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist/author Buzz Bissinger had a talk show on WPHT-AM. He was controversial, to say the least, opinionated and left-leaning, so he was very much in step with the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he earned a Pulitzer.

All was well until 2012, when Buzz endorsed Republican Mitt Romney for President, snubbing incumbent Democrat Barack Obama.  (Flash quiz: Who was Romney’s running mate? Answer below.)

Well, you would have thought Buzz had put on a white Klan robe.

There was a furor, and at the end of it, Bizz candidly and mournfully reported that a number of his liberal friends ended their friendship with him because Buzz had the temerity to endorse a former Massachusetts governor and the Mormon moderate who orgnized the 2002 Winter Olympics, among other achievements.

It was an eye-opening experience for him.

(Paul Ryan was Romney’s running mate.)

—-

Back to my prediction for 2028.

The Democratic candidate for President will beat the Republican candidate for President. Period.

Yes, you heard it. Democrats are surprised as Republicans. Don’t flip out. It’s one person’s opinion.

This assumes that Trump will not suddenly change course, meaning he gets out of the war with Iran with America’s honor intact, that gasoline gets down to about $3 a gallon, that inflation drops, along with grocery prices at the supermarket, that he stops enriching himself, and stops his mania for monuments to gild his legacy.

Is Trump likely to change? Even though he admitted (to 60 Minutes) that ICE enforcement was too harsh, he appointed the architect of that policy, Stephen Miller, as his new chief of staff. Trump is doubling down on political failure. He is not listening to voters, and neither are his remaining drooling sycophants in congress. They just selected shirt-sleeved, hot-tongued Jim Jordan to be the House leader. Don’t expect him to smoke a peace pipe.

Trump worked his butt off campaigning for Republicans across the nation, but almost all lost. The MAGA magic is gone. Trump told everyone to pretend he was on the ballot. Americans did that, and you saw the result.

Now we are not going to get the $5,000 bribe he promised Americans if they kept a GOP majority. As if we were going to get it anyway.

Then there is the historical precedent. Since Herbert Hoover there has been only one case of a President being succeeded, by an election, by a member of his own party – when George H.W. Bush in 1980 followed Ronald Reagan.

“Hmmm,“ says a well-informed man with whom I discuss politics. “So you are saying Kamala Harris beats JD Vance?”

“Hmmm, hmmm,” I say. “That seems unlikely, but — yes.”

Any Democrat will beat any Republican.

AOC will beat Marco Rubio.

Josh Shapiro will beat Ted Cruz.

Gavin Newsom will beat Ron DeSantis, who was described by conservative columnist Matt K. Lewis as “a robot aping a human.” He also said Ted Cruz “has become less oleaginous over the years.”

Throw in Donald Trump Jr., Chris Christie, Rand Paul, plus others. It’s a real clambake.

I grant you some of these candidacies sound unlikely, but as things stand now, Trump has ruined the Republican brand for independents, the people in the middle who actually decide the election.

When GOP front-runner Vance defended Vivak Ramaswamy’s vicious and unprincipled mother-f’ing commercial in Ohio, he killed himself with independents.

Rubio still defends the war, even when much of MAGA despises it. They feel back-stabbed because Trump promised an end to foreign military adventures.

Even most Republicans must feel the lies they had swallowed for almost 10 years now have to be spit out.

So that’s why I feel as I do, that any Democrat will beat any Republican for President in 2028.

We will find out if I am right on Nov. 7, 2028.

Until then, fire away.