It is the 2024 election pre-season
Potential candidates for president in 2024 are considering their options and laying the groundwork.
They had better be.
It isn't early. It's late.
The election in November, 2024 is the endgame. The real period of nominee selection takes place throughout the year prior, 2023, and it is coming up shortly. By April, 2019, there were three or four Democratic and Republican candidates holding events in New Hampshire on any given day. Within a year candidates will have campaign staffs and offices working in New Hampshire. That takes time and early money.
Campaigns for president are made or lost in the early primaries when a field of plausible candidates--governors, senators, military officers, business people--get winnowed out. Perfectly competent people get lost in the scrum. It helps to have a well-established brand going into the New Hampshire contest. Pete Buttigieg essentially did it from scratch; he had a story, the gay wunderkind.
For the process to work as it did for the 2016 and 2020 election, both Trump and Biden need to get out of the way. That would create a path for a successor to re-define the party. They would be a successor, not a rival. Lightning could strike with a message that goes viral. Speeches like the one by State Senator Mallory McMorrow made on the floor of the Michigan state house can take a "nobody" and make them an inspiration and superstar, on everybody's radar.
More typical is John Delaney. On paper he was a plausible candidate for president in the early months of 2019. He had already held about 50 town-hall events in New Hampshire by the time I saw him at two events on April 14, 2019. He would have over a hundred more of them. He was a former three-term U.S. Representative. He was a lawyer who made several hundred million dollars as the founder of businesses he built than sold. He could self-fund his early campaign. He was 55 years old. He had center-left political positions, along the lines that Democrats eventually selected when they chose Joe Biden. He was a younger, gaffe-free Biden. But he stayed a "nobody." He wasn't a celebrity and his talks didn't inspire people. His events drew 20 to 40 people and never grew from that.
Later that day I saw Jay Inslee, the governor of the State of Washington. Inslee had a brand: Climate. I saw cars with climate-oriented bumper strips parked for the event. About 35 people attended. He never caught on.
On April 15 William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts was the featured speaker at a Foreign Affairs Forum event at a New Hampshire college meeting room. He was challenging Trump. The event had its usual audience of 50 people. He, too, had a brand: The sensible, responsible, non-Trump Republican. It was what the audience wanted, but not the GOP's voters.
April 17 and 18 I saw events by Marianne Williamson, Beto O'Rourke, and Eric Swalwell. Wilkerson had a following of New-Age self-actualizers, O'Rourke was famous for having taken on Ted Cruz and narrowly losing, and U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell was a frequent guest on CNN and MSNBC. They never caught on.
We are back to all this in less than a year. If Donald Trump or Joe Biden step aside there may be over a dozen Democratic and Republican candidates. If both Trump and Biden seek a re-match, the candidates will be fewer. Possibly Liz Cheney, if she loses in Wyoming, would run as a symbol of the still-pure old-style GOP. Mike Pence might do so, too. A Democrat who contested Joe Biden for the nomination would be taking a risky bet and might be accused of damaging the party and disrespecting Kamala Harris, a mixed race woman. Perhaps Stacey Abrams, if she wins her Georgia governorship campaign, would be a symbol of the successful and impatient younger generation. If she won or came close in New Hampshire, Biden--like Lyndon Johnson back in 1968--might fold up his tent. That would put her in a lead position. She would have shown she was unafraid.