1. Some libertarians are very cynical about voting, and understandably so.  But then there are some libertarians who think it is just stupid to follow any of the presidential politics or to bother voting at all.  They say all the candidates are the same, and nothing would change anyway.  If you take this position, it means you think there would be no difference between RFK Jr. and Joe Biden.  It means you think that a Vivek Ramaswamy administration would be the same as a Nikki Haley or Mike Pence administration.
2. Even if you think voting is futile, it is still interesting to watch the presidential race because it is an indication of where public opinion lies.  The top three Republicans in the polls are Trump, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy.  Combined, they make up over 75% in most polls.  Everyone else is in single digits, with some barely showing a percentage point.  When it comes to foreign policy, these are the three least hawkish candidates, at least in rhetoric.  This is a great sign for the Republican Party.  The Republican Party of the Bush years is not coming back any time soon.  This is reason for great optimism.
3. Aside from being evil, Biden also has some form of dementia or something like it.  He is 80 years old, but he is an old 80.  It’s hard to imagine Trump acting like this when he turns 80 in a few years.  The Democrats know this is a problem, but so is Kamala Harris.  They need someone to run against Trump.  I didn’t think Biden would be the nominee in 2020, but I was wrong.  The establishment needed someone to defeat Trump, so they put up Biden while keeping him mostly hidden during the campaign.
4. The Democrats and the establishment in general have a problem with RFK Jr. in the race.  They cannot have a televised debate that includes RFK.  So even if they want to dump Biden off the ticket, they can’t do it now because it will open up a reason for debates.  They don’t want Gavin Newsom or someone else up there with RFK either.  If the Democratic establishment decides to dump Biden, they will wait until the last minute to make it public.  Then they don’t have to have any debates and can just crown the successor.  I believe that RFK is an even scarier prospect for the establishment than Trump.
5. One major factor in the 2024 election that is not much discussed is the economy.  Sure, you can hear about “Bidenomics” and unemployment and inflation, but there is not a lot of talk about how a deep recession would play into the race.  It is obviously hard to predict, but the yield curve has been highly inverted for most of 2023, which is a predictor of recession.  If the Everything Bubble pops before the 2024 election, this will have a big impact.  Biden is already disliked by a majority of people.  This will make it far worse for him and the Democrats.
6. The only hope of Biden legitimately beating Trump is because Trump is so disliked that people hold their nose and vote for Biden anyway.  But there comes a point where if Biden is really terrible too in people’s eyes, some of them might just not vote or vote for a third party.
7. The powers-that-be are trying to make it a crime just to question the authenticity of an election.  I believe there was fraud in 2020, just as there is fraud in every national election.  The biggest thing that makes me question the 2020 election is that the vote counting stopped in the big cities in the swing states all around the same time on election night.  By early the next morning, the vote counting resumed and Biden was being declared the likely winner.
8. One way to eliminate the power of election fraud is for an overwhelming victory.  If the election is close, fraud is much easier to implement.  If Trump overwhelmingly beats Biden or some other candidate in 2024, it makes it much harder to add or change enough votes to make a difference in the outcome.  If the margin is in the hundreds of thousands in the swing states, fraud becomes difficult to get away with.

My Picks

I don’t expect any president to tear down the deep state, but there is no question that a president could make a difference.  The president can at least try to take on the deep state at some level, which includes the military-industrial complex.  I don’t expect anything close to a balanced budget or fiscal sanity, but there is always hope that a president could scale back the U.S. empire overseas and stop fighting these terrible wars.

As it stands now, here is my preference list for the next president.

1. The Libertarian Party candidate (assuming it is someone from the Mises Caucus)
2. Robert Kennedy Jr.
3. Vivek Ramaswamy
4. Donald Trump
5. Ron DeSantis

Everyone else is absolutely terrible.  I have my doubts about everyone on my list too.  They all have major faults, and I can’t fully trust any of them.  I strongly disagree with Kennedy on some social and economic issues, but I think he is honest.  I will take an old-school Democrat who still supports a welfare state if he can scale back the warfare state.

Ironically, RFK could end up being the best one on economics only because he has the best chance of reducing military/ war spending.

We have no idea what we would get with Vivek.  He seems to have a different message sometimes for different crowds, which scares me a bit.  He is not a libertarian, but he is probably the most libertarian with his rhetoric, and there is hope that he is evolving (in a good way) on some issues.

We already saw four years of Trump, but there is always hope that he might be a little bit better next time.  Assuming he gets the Republican nomination, it will tell a lot who he picks as his running mate.

DeSantis has been a disappointment in the presidential race.  He looks very weak and unable to take bold positions that actually mean anything.  I don’t need a bold position on Disney being “woke”.  DeSantis would be unlikely to take on the foreign policy establishment, although he probably wouldn’t be as bad as the other war hawks in the race.  Anyway, I would rather DeSantis stay as my governor in Florida.

All of the other candidates are terrible.  Some of them talk a good game on economics, but it doesn’t matter.  They care more about fighting wars and maintaining the U.S. empire.  There won’t be any spending cuts coming from these people, so the economics doesn’t matter anyway.