It would shock the hell out of me A Republican is ever allowed to be President again. The system will allow for an election but the system won't allow it for a R to win.
Allow? It is heavily slanted in their favour, or else they'd get clobbered already. They haven't won the popular vote since 2004, but the real killer is the state governments that are run by an R. State governments set the rules for who can vote and how it is counted, and they suppress the vote of groups they figure are not inclined to vote their way (blacks most of all). Even with all that working to rig things in their favour in 2020, the Republicans & Trump still lost. That's why they claimed cheating and tried to overthrow the vote result; their own guys, who had called things as much in their favour as they could legally do, still had to concede it was a loss.
I agree with those who say that the Trump movement is a cult. There is no ability among them to ever admit they were wrong, or failed, or anything like that - when reality does not agree with their rhetoric, they just deny reality and try to gaslight supporters and foes alike. That's a cult - a cult of personality at the very least. People think that kind of shit just happens in 3rd world countries, but the US has proved they are not any better, ready to violently flip out when things do not go their way. Part of that is just America's culture, which Trump epitomizes in all its worst aspects, but part is just the fact they have been escalating the dirty politics more and more, to the point where they are running out of innovative new ways to fuck up their own country.
331MM people and the best they can run is Biden/Trump? A choice of the shinest of two turds.
It really is a giant failure. Both the big parties disappoint most of the voting population. And yet somehow they are still there - whether it is because of big money, or just political habits, or having been in the system so long they have rigged it to never allow real outsider competition.
The system vomited up two uninspiring unpopular candidates in 2016, and the "winner" of that contest had less support than the guys who had lost the election 2 times before. Did the parties learn anything from that, maybe take the hint that whatever they are doing, producing quality candidates sure ain't it? No, they did not. 2020 was scarcely better, and 2024 may be even worse.
It's like their system is saying: "The problem is not us (our candidates, our policies, or our tactics) - it's the people who are at fault, for not buying into whatever so-called choice we hand them."