Crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good
By 
Donald Trump is going to be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee. This is becoming more evident by the day:
Former President Donald Trump is still the heavy favorite to win the GOP’s 2024 nomination, according to a new Emerson College poll.
In a hypothetical 10-way Republican presidential primary, Trump scores 55 percent of the vote, the poll found, putting him 30 points ahead of his closest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who stands at 25 percent support.
No other candidate breaks double-digits. Former Vice President Mike Pence takes third place with just 8 percent of the vote, while former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who became the first major Republican candidate to challenge Trump for the GOP nod earlier this month, finishes with just 5 percent support.
Two things make this inevitable:
(1) A collective action problem: the only way any other candidate would have a shot at the nomination would be if the race for the GOP nomination featured only two candidates: Trump and Not Trump. That’s obviously not going to happen, or at least not until it’s far too late. The GOP primary structure is heavily weighted towards winner take all, which gives Trump a completely unstoppable advantage in a race with several candidates, since 35% to 40% of Republican primary voters are locked in for him from the jump.
(2) Trump would absolutely ensure that, if someone else were to get the nomination, that person would lose the general election. He’s making the party an offer it can’t refuse — not that it’s going to be necessary to put a horse’s head in anybody’s satin sheets, given that in every significant respect it’s still very much his party from top to bottom.
It’s going to be Biden against Trump, and whatever reservations one might have about another Biden term — mine are based solely on his age — could not possibly be less relevant in this context.