Okay, I’m calling it: We’ve officially entered the silly season of presidential-nomination speculation.
That’s why we’re getting articles about how secure President Joe Biden’s hold is on renomination if he winds up running again in 2024 and articles about how shaky Vice President Kamala Harris looks right now. Expect more. Expect them to be silly. Expect them to be sillier than such articles usually are at this point in the cycle, and they usually are quite silly indeed.
The problem is that there’s very good reason to write about presidential nominations several years before the Iowa caucuses — traditionally, the first event in which voters get to weigh in. Political scientists disagree on exactly how important this stage can be for choosing the nominee, but it’s pretty clear that early skirmishing around the nomination is an important part of a long process in which candidates and party actors wind up pushing the eventual nominee, and therefore the party as a whole, toward something resembling agreement on policy positions and priorities.