Conservative warns GOP against 'delusions' about easily beating Biden

President Joe Biden isn't breaking records for presidential popularity, but conservative Rich Lowry argues in his latest Politico essay that it would be a mistake to think he'll be easy to beat in the 2024 election.

Even though Biden's approval rating is still stuck in the 44 percent range, Lowry notes that the president was in even worse shape politically in 2022, when Republicans suffered a significantly disappointing election result.

In fact, Lowry argues that the "Trumpified" Republican Party has made beating an incumbent president harder than it needs to be.

This problem would only be magnified, writes Lowry, if former President Donald Trump is once again the GOP's presidential nominee next year.

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"Trump would probably be weaker going into a rematch than the first time around," he writes. "He lost to Biden in 2020 — before he denied the results of a national election, before a fevered band of his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, before he indulged every 2020 conspiracy theory that came across his desk, before he said the Constitution should be suspended and before he made his primary campaign partly about rebuking traditional Republicans that the GOP suburbanites he’d need in a general election probably still feel warmly about."

What's more, argues Lowry, things might not be any better for non-Trump candidates given how Trump has been giving indications that he will blow up everything if he is denied the nomination.

"If a non-Trump candidate wins the nomination, he or she will have Trump in the background, probably determined to gain revenge against him or her," he writes.