One of the common – and in my view, valid – criticisms of US political journalism is that it tends to cover electoral politics as if they were horse races, with TV talking heads and print journalists ginning up the public’s excitement via exaggerated emphasis on any and every point that can service a narrative of entertaining competition.
We can already observe this pattern in coverage of the primary elections that will determine the Republican Party’s presidential candidate for 2024. The primaries won’t be held for almost a year (between February and June next year), but potential candidates are already beginning to campaign, and journalists are already busy crafting an exciting story about whether anyone can realistically defeat Donald Trump.
For many of us, the prospects for 2024 are not exciting but terrifying, and the main questions are: which Republican presidential candidate, if any, would be least bad/most likely to lose? And how do we make sure that the Democrats keep the White House and gain as much power in Congress as possible? The stakes are particularly high for the transgender community, amid a national climate of increasing anti-trans hostility.
