Ladies and gentlemen, start your election engines.

Ready or not 2024 is here, and that means you are in for the ride of your life! The all-important Iowa caucuses are here in just two weeks, and by the end of the month New Hampshire voters may have slammed shut the door for any candidate other than Donald Trump to grab the Republican Party presidential nomination.

But that’s all right, we don’t need plain politics to make this election year interesting. For that we have the Democrats’ rigged indictments and novel legal theories. There are four criminal trials scheduled throughout the year, any one of which could force Trump off the campaign trail long enough to significantly alter the election. Then there is the absurd effort to remove Trump from the ballot in multiple states due to an inventive reading of the 14th Amendment’s ban on Confederate rebels holding office in the U.S. government.

And if that weren’t enough, House Republicans have ordered up an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden that will compete with Trump’s legal woes for your attention. Does the GOP with its slim majority in the House have enough votes to actually impeach Biden? Possibly not, but it may not matter as long as the mainstream media covers the inquiry with a degree of fairness. There is nothing appetizing about the Bidens’ dealings with foreign entities over the last two decades, and voters may choose to spew out their already lukewarm affection for the Democratic candidate.

So where to begin?

It has to be declared upfront that the election cycle takes precedence over the legal cycle and even the impeachment cycle. Remember, there is nothing to prevent Trump from running for president even if he is a convicted felon. There is nothing to prevent him from taking office if he is a convicted felon. So the only way such a conviction might impact the election is if voters reject the former president as a result of something they learn from the legal proceedings that turns them against Trump.

But as I showed in my last column, voters are already well informed about Trump’s eccentricities, and they prefer him over........

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