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Your post is a good one, but I think it would have been more relevant 20+ years ago when things were different. With fast-moving news cycles and short attention spans, it's much harder now to carry momentum from a losing campaign into the next election season. A big reason for this is that the candidate immediately gets tagged as a loser and has to overcome that stigma four years later against fresh competitors.

Look how quickly most of the losing candidates in presidential primaries tend to vanish from the scene. Those candidates rarely do well in future campaigns — and if they do win a nomination in the future, they tend to be awful candidates in the general election. John McCain and Hillary Clinton are two who immediately come to mind.

Your post is a good one, but I think it would have been more relevant 20+ years ago when things were different.

Thanks, and you're likely true as well. To the best of my recollection, only in recent times was Ronald Reagan able to turn a losing 1976 primary campaign into a winning 1980 campaign.

Since then, it seems that all of our presidents have largely appeared out of nowhere and charged to the top.

I've resigned myself to the fact that Trump is the likely GOP nominee. I hope he can emerge victorious. I will say, recent polling has me slightly more confident that I was a few months ago.

But Trump will not live forever. We need a solid back bench. And with this, I don't see anything wrong with DeSantis tossing his hat into the ring in 2024 and garnering the experience of running a primary campaign. And if he holds Trump's feet to the fire, it will be better for both of them.

The notion that Trump deserves an unchallenged primary, free of criticism, I'm not buying. Trump needs to make his case, --not to the MAGA faithful, but to everyone else.