All eyes will turn to 2024 after the November midterm elections are over. On the Republican side, there’s plenty of speculation about who will become the standard-bearer. Is it Donald Trump once more? Ron DeSantis and his surge of popularity will continue to rise.
Or will it be…Will Hurd? Wait, what?
I’m not just making that up. According to a lengthy profile in The Atlantic, Hurd sees himself as a sort of conservative savior (though, he wouldn’t use that phrase) with an already built-in majority constituency.
“The overwhelming majority of conservative people in this country…are not watching Fox News every night or imbibing conspiracy theories online. ‘But now they’re getting fed up. They’re tired of everyone. They want something new.’”https://t.co/EyNFpsz4LR
— Will Hurd (@WillHurd) March 28, 2022
Will Hurd, who had recently retired from Congress last spring, felt lost. Hurd was reluctant to author a book about his life and diagnose a dysfunctional political system. He also teased out the possibility of running for president in 2024. But Hurd still struggled with anxiety. For the first time in his adult life, the guy who’d climbed so quickly—from college class president to star CIA operative to lone Black Republican in the House—didn’t know his next move…
…“Some of my friends, some of my former colleagues, they are desperate,” Hurd tells me. “They are so desperate to hold on to their positions, to hold on to their power, that they make really bad decisions.”
Those bad decisions are evident when it comes to big, history-forming events, such as the party’s enabling of Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy. But the bad decisions are also made subtly, in response to smaller episodes every single day, often to accommodate the party’s ugliest impulses. (The third chapter of Hurd’s book, written as an open letter to the Republican Party, is titled “Don’t Be an Asshole, Racist, Misogynist, or Homophobe.”)
If you don’t know who Hurd is, you aren’t alone. He’s a relatively obscure former congressman outside of beltway circles having retired at the age of 42 prior to the 2020 election. His GOP replacement in Texas was able to surpass his electoral margins even though the cycle wasn’t kind to Republicans. Hurd is also your typical establishment figure who believes he truly stands tall against the excesses of the party’s base, whatever those may be in his mind.
He’s also delusional.
Let’s start with who he ran to in order to share his story. Tim Alberta was a writer at National Review. He moved to more open pastures when the chance presented itself. If he was ever actually a conservative, he’s staunchly on the left at this point. If Hurd wants to reach the great unwashed masses on the right who aren’t watching Fox News every night, he couldn’t have picked a worse conduit than Alberta and the far-left dumpster fire that is The Atlantic. That decision alone is enough for me to make a sound judgment that he simply doesn’t have what it takes to compete in 2024.
Then there’s his background. Hurd, a former CIA operative finds himself an alumnus from an agency that essentially has no one on the correct trusts. Anyone running in 2024 will need to have anti-establishment credibility, and Hurd, from his pre-politics employment to his Paul Ryan alliance once in office, simply doesn’t fit that bill. Hurd is exactly what most Republicans want to avoid.
The idea that Republicans who watch Fox News aren’t “normal” is also a miscalculation on Hurd’s part. Most people have a fairly low level of engagement with politics before the major elections. In that sense, he’s correct there are a lot of currently unengaged voters out there on the right. However, this does not mean that they have fundamentally different views than those who regularly watch Tucker Carlson. This idea that there’s a majority sitting out there ready to jump on board a Hurd candidacy strikes me as lunacy.
Alberta already has responded to this criticism.
That’s right: the savants who never saw Obama coming, who gave Trump no shot, who used Ron Paul & Bernie Sanders & Andrew Yang as punch lines, who missed Brexit & Macron & AMLO, who thought Zelensky was just a pretty face… know for sure who can and can’t catch fire in 2024. https://t.co/d08EUPKde7
— Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) March 28, 2022
Hurd seems to believe that Hurd’s shot is identical to the one given to him by past stars, all of whom had high-name-IDs prior to their rise. That’s just silly, and to add context to Alberta’s snark, only Trump and Obama became the President of the United States out of his list. Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders were the punchlines. Many people of right knew that Brexit was coming. The insertion of Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t even make sense, but I’m not sure it’s supposed to because Alberta is just listing random people by the time his post ends.
I don’t claim to know exactly what will happen in 2024. But I do know that the nominee won’t be someone who turns back time. Trump will not be easy to defeat, but if Trump loses (or he decides against it despite his flirtation), the nomination will go to someone such as DeSantis. He has been fighting for change in this country the last four decades. Importantly, it will not be Trump, but someone who can fight on both a tax and cultural level. Hurd’s ability to fight is not evident and he should be running to Tim Alberta in order to get his candidacy approved.
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