JD Vance is likely to be the 2028 Republican nominee. Betting markets give him about a 50% chance, and I would recommend buying at that price.
In forecasting, the first thing you usually do is look at base rates. Here, the relevant question is, when a vice president runs after serving under a two-term president, how often does he get the nomination?
In the last hundred years, we’ve had four such cases:
Nixon in 1960 (and again in 1968), after Eisenhower (1953-1961)
George H.W. Bush in 1988, after Reagan (1981-1989)
Gore in 2000, after Clinton (1993-2001)
Biden in 2020, after Obama (2009-2017)
In each of these situations, the current or former vice president won his party’s nomination. This alone gets you to at least 50% odds, even with the small sample size, using a generous threshold of statistical significance. The further back we look the more questionable the relevance of the data becomes. Still, you have to go all the way back to Charles Fairbanks’ failed 1916 campaign to see a break with the pattern.
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This could very well be a good thing.
If the Republican party becomes 100% (not just 80%) America's populist party - then even the left wing populists will end up pulling a Bernie-bro and joining them. This will result in a giant sucking sound as populists in the Democrat party get sucked out into the Republicans and remaining non-populist Republicans get sucked out into the Democrats. Within a few years, both parties will be realigned into populist Republicans and anti-populist Democrats.
With that move, Democrats will be able to fully embrace abundance, trade, immigration, and constitutional protections.
Sounds like an interesting world to me. There's at least a certain clean elegance to it.
> But no one on the right who has a large voice cares that the federal government took a 10% stake in Intel.
Not entirely true. Ben Shapiro closed his podcast yesterday by panning the intel deal.
“Nationalization of American industries is a bad idea. I understand that the Trump administration is trying to do as much as it can from the executive branch of the government. They're doing it on crime.
They're doing it on immigration. On immigration, they have plenary power. On crime, not so much.
Doing it on the economy is not what the executive branch was designed to do. It is not. Congress should step in.
Congress is an independent branch of government. The president of the United States should not unilaterally be making tariff policy. That is not what the system was designed to do.
I don't like it happening, whether it is Democrat or Republican, and the grand centralization of nearly all power in the executive branch as a whole is a massive, massive institutional flaw in our republic right now. It also means that whenever we have a presidential election, it is tooth and nail because I guess if you grab the executive branch, then you basically run everything. And that is a huge systemic problem that the founders never would have tolerated.”