The Strangest Election Year In US History Has Begun…

By Brian Cates

In a way, it is a GOOD THING this election season is unfolding in the highly unusual way that it is. We’ve now embarked on the weirdest primary season I’ve ever seen, but this is GREAT in one specific way:

In every other election year I’ve witnessed since 1988, most of the public is tuned out at this point. Historically, they do not start paying attention to the election races until long after the primaries are over and the general election races have been set in stone. That’s toward the end of the Summer and heading into the Fall.

But that hasn’t been happening this year. And this man pictured below has a lot to do with why this most unusual US primary season has been unfolding the way it has.

Trump has a way of getting people’s attention, have you noticed that?

When he declared he was running for US President again in December of 2022, longtime political commentators scoffed and mocked Trump for his way-too-premature announcement.

It had been assumed his having his Mar A Lago home raided by the FBI the previous August and the years-long January 6 investigation over the supposed ‘insurrection’ he led in Washington DC on the day of the Electoral College vote in the US Congress would render Trump unable to gather much steam for a reelection bid.

Instead, Trump announced anyway and did it so early that he caught all his enemies flat-footed, as usual. It was obvious that Florida governor Ron DeSantis was prepping for a 2024 run. Still, Trump going first meant DeSantis was forced to spend almost 6 months denying it and playing coy with the news media about it until his campaign was ready for him to declare.

Going first and so early gave Trump several distinct and key advantages, while most of the political punditry and news media world focused on the perceived disadvantages.

For one thing, it robbed any other candidates gearing up to challenge The Big Name for the nomination of any real early momentum. Trump is an attention-grabbing black hole. Always has been. It’s not just his oversized personality or combative nature; when the 16 or so other candidates for the GOP nomination back in 2016 stood next to him on stage, they all but disappeared.

DeSantis’ 5 years of building his street cred among the MAGA Trump faithful was a strategy that was supposed to pay off when he proffered himself as the successor to a weakened and increasingly under-siege Trump who clearly was not going to go anywhere in the 2024 race under such growing baggage.

Instead of paying off, this strategy massively backfired on DeSantis and his campaign strategists. By the time the primary season kicked off in mid-January in Iowa, it was assumed Trump would’ve been successfully reduced to the political equivalent of a bubbling pool of toxic waste, and the noble DeSantis would magnanimously step up to the plate and catch the mantle as it fell from Trump’s stooped shoulders.

But Trump wasn’t destroyed. Like the radioactive monster Godzilla, who eats every nuclear blast designed to destroy him and keeps coming with a ferocious smile, Trump took every single thing thrown at him and kept going.

The fascinating recent developments in the absurd Trump lawfare in multiple court cases in New York, as well as in Washington DC and Fulton County Georgia, and now what Nikki Haley is currently doing in refusing to drop out of a race she can’t win, is not only CAPTURING and HOLDING the public’s attention when they normally wouldn’t be watching…

…massive problems in how the current national and state-level GOP leadership have set up their primary rules are being PULLED OUT INTO THE OPEN..and this is happening while the public is paying rapt attention.

I want to stress this. We just left the month of January. It’s still Winter. Traditionally, about 80% of the American public is more focused on the Super Bowl and other events instead of election primaries not even unfolding in their home states.

You just had millions of people who never paid much attention at all to the primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire watching with keen interest how Trump was doing vs. the rest of the field. In freaking January.

Now, the Nevada primary is coming up in 6 days, and then the South Carolina primary on the 24th, and Trump will be doing his level best to keep the public paying attention and watching what happens. And willingly or not, Haley is playing a key role in helping our President do that.

And it’s actually a very GOOD thing that people are looking at the primaries right now because a big problem has been exposed in how they’re being done.

Let’s talk about that.

A Much-Needed Spotlight On How GOP Primaries Are Being Skewed

Why in the heck are The Ronna and the NH GOP allowing the gaming of their primary system like this, where 48,000+ Dems and others hostile to the GOP and especially to TRUMP are being allowed to walk in and vote and not just ‘help’ determine the presidential candidate, but also many of the DOWN BALLOT federal and state/county level races?

They had something like FORTY-EIGHT THOUSAND non-party members voting in the NH primary. People are flooding in and being allowed to vote because they’d changed their party status to ‘undeclared.’

It sure looks like shenanigans shaved off 8-9 pts off Trump’s win in New Hampshire last week because the results were heavily influenced by operatives being allowed to skew the results.

Why is that even being allowed? Shouldn’t the voting be set up to reflect the wishes of the actual MEMBERS of the party, and not people just flooding in for one damn day to try to skew the vote count?

This probably doesn’t matter much in the next big primary race where Trump and Haley are going head to head; it looks like Trump is up 27 pts or so in South Carolina from what I see from the polls at Real Clear Politics. I don’t see activist groups getting 48k Dems & Trump-hating Indies to undeclare and crossover to cast a vote for Haley in the Palmetto state.

Just this past week there were numerous developments in the lawfare cases Trump is facing in multiple jurisdictions. It’s becoming increasingly clear as time marches on that none of these cases have any real ‘legs’; they were brought to interfere with Trump’s ability to conduct an effective reelection campaign.

A perfect example of this is how Judge Arthur Engoron, after making sure all the press and everyone had eagerly assembled at the courthouse to hear his ruling on the Trump bank fraud for two days in a row this week continued to delay and milk the case for all it was worth by suddenly announcing he’ll get around to revealing his ruling sometime in mid-February.

I understand this is frustrating and hard for many people to watch. The patent unfairness of it all, the hysterical drama of the Trump haters, alternately cheering his supposed forthcoming demise, and then shrieking like banshees when he inevitably somehow, by some arcane act of wizardrous sorcery…escapes his enemies yet again.

But don’t miss the point: everybody **is** watching all of this. And we’ll continue to watch. Trump is, if nothing else, a consummate showman.

And this fascinating unfolding ‘movie’ will do nothing but help Trump in his campaign to return to the White House next year.