Recent polling of Republican voters in the US, according to the Five Thirty-Eight Politics podcast, suggests that between 60 and 80 per cent want former president Donald Trump to be their party’s candidate again in 2024. 

Of course, if Trump had already decided not to stand, it would do him no good at all to announce the fact this far from the start of the primary season two years from now; so long as there is speculation about his intentions, he maintains his influence over the party. So to keep his fans, and his enemies, guessing, he regularly takes to the airwaves to offer his philosophical take on the great issues of the day. 

This week he was talking to his old pal, Nigel Farage, about wind turbines. You will be unsurprised to learn that the 45th president (and, who knows, maybe the 47th too?) is not a great fan of wind turbines, blaming them for killing birds and rusting too easily. It’s a view.

The polling and the profile will make many across the political landscape nervous; there are plenty of Republicans, as well as Democrats, who view the prospect of a third consecutive run by Trump with distaste, if not horror. The mere presence of the property billionaire in the primary contest would warp all judgment and sense, leaving otherwise serious candidates once more in the shade.

But of course the Democrats are even more nervous. Assuming that the 79-year-old President Joe Biden doesn’t seek a second term, who would stand a chance of defeating Trump in three years’ time? Encouragingly, senior people in the party and the administration have already effectively admitted that the current vice-president, Kamala Harris, should not be the party’s standard bearer, whether or not Trump stands. Briefings suggest that come the next vacancy on the Supreme Court, Harris will find herself out of the White House and into judicial robes.

The first female and the first black person to hold the vice-presidency, Harris has not impressed in her first year in the job. Her calamitous and brief run for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020 had already convinced many that she is not the obvious candidate to run next time. Understandably, but perhaps unfairly, comparisons are being made with Hillary Clinton’s disastrously complacent campaign in 2016. And lessons have been learned.

The sex or ethnic makeup of a candidate is less important than their abilities. The Democrat establishment were willing to turn a blind eye to Clinton’s divisiveness and unpopularity across swathes of America because they judged that she was not up against a serious candidate. Next time round, whether or not Trump is a challenger, the party cannot afford to take any chances. The Democrats lost in 2016, not because of the electoral college or even because of Trump; they lost because they chose the wrong candidate.

Other left-of-centre progressive parties – and you can probably guess which one I’m referring to – regularly make the same wrong choices and then blame the electorate, the Conservative Party or the electoral system for their failure, as if somehow the political world owes the Labour Party a living. 

In the last four elections, Labour deliberately and knowingly went into the election with the wrong candidate for prime minister. Apart from a brief three-month period at the start of his premiership, it was clear Gordon Brown was never going to win a general election. The same judgment was made of Ed Miliband from the moment he beat his older brother to the winning post in 2010. And no serious party has ever chosen a leader less suited to high office than Jeremy Corbyn.

And yet choose him they did. Twice. That makes a total of four times in the last 15 years, if you count Miliband and Brown (although Labour MPs, in their wisdom and concern for their own careers, refused to offer a choice of candidate when Tony Blair stepped down in 2007. But that was a choice too). 

At the root of this perennially poor judgment by MPs and members lies a worrying degree of arrogance. Given how rarely Labour has won general elections in its entire existence, it is odd that it still seems to believe it can challenge the electorate not to vote for it by presenting the wrong candidate for prime minister: “Here, take him or leave him!” You would have thought that after the first time the voters decided to leave him, the party would have reconsidered its approach and started thinking about candidates that were acceptable to the broader electorate and not just to party activists who think it’s perfectly normal to spend their Thursday evenings in cold, draughty community halls discussing bin collections.

The frustration is that on almost every occasion in recent history, elections where either the Democrats or Labour fell short could have been won with the right candidate. Had Brown been persuaded to step aside for Alan Johnson, David Cameron might never have reached Downing Street. David Miliband would certainly have presented a more attractive and electable party in 2015. And the number of Labour MPs who would have made a better job than Corbyn of leading the party ran into three figures.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (and if we need to get the #HarrisDoctrine trending, so be it): when choosing a leader, party members need to vote for the candidate they believe their non-political neighbour would want to be prime minister (or president). That another candidate might be more politically attuned to your own beliefs is sweet and interesting and irrelevant.

The last six years have made Donald Trump a far more serious political campaigner than he was when he first swept all before him. If they need to stop him resuming office in January 2025, the Democrats need a candidate who will appeal to those Americans who voted for him in 2016. Colour, sex and ideology don’t matter; or at least, they don’t matter nearly as much as a candidate’s ability to convince voters that they deserve their trust and support.

The Democrats may have learned this lesson. Has Labour?