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The general election begins with Biden and Trump showing as many vulnerabilities as assets. Trump is trying to overturn the 2020 election, faces 91 felonies, and has threatened to take unconstitutional actions if elected to a second term. Biden is already the oldest president in U.S. history, has the lowest approval ratings of any modern incumbent seeking a second term, and faces doubts about his ability to serve into his mid-80s. .
Many Americans wish they didn’t have this choice. Some continue to imagine a race without one or both at the top of the party ticket. Scenarios are floating around the campaign that either there will be a Democratic convention or that Trump will somehow be disqualified. On Tuesday, for example, President Michelle Obama’s office declared that she was not a candidate for president this year, putting an end to a far-right notion that had been swirling for months.
Barring something unexpected, 2024 will likely be a repeat of the 2020 election, but in a markedly different country and political landscape. In 2020, while Trump was an unpopular incumbent, the country was reeling from the worst pandemic in 100 years, and the economy was in a doldrums, Biden kept himself out of the spotlight and Trump out of it. benefited from electoral strategy.
The 2024 election will come with its own troubling challenges, including the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol; Trump has been indicted multiple times on charges stemming from the post-election period. Other issues include the worst inflation in 40 years, the lowest unemployment rate in nearly as long, and the Supreme Court’s decision to abolish the constitutional right to abortion, which became the most explosive political issue of the time. .
“There are no historical comparisons to this election,” said Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg.
Historical metrics that once helped predict election outcomes are being called into question. Biden did poorly in the polls in 2022, but his party did better than expected. Inflation was supposed to hurt Democrats, but instead abortion hurt Republicans. The president drew criticism late in the campaign for focusing on threats to democracy rather than inflation, but many Democratic voters were urged to vote to weaken the power of a Republican party they considered too extreme. .
Opinion polls show Biden trailing nationally, with him trailing in many of the six competitive battleground states. The southern tier includes Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. These late winter polls are not predictive. Many show races within the survey’s margin of error. Nevertheless, it is true that in the 2020 cycle, Biden never once trailed behind Trump in national polls following the Washington Post ABC News, and often took a deft lead.
Re-election campaigns generally favor the incumbent. But Whit Ayers, a Republican pollster and no friend of President Trump, sees Biden as the clear underdog. He cited public dissatisfaction with the overall direction of the country, with Trump seen as more trusted on the economy and immigration, and an overwhelming percentage of Americans believing the incumbent would be the best in the world. He said he believed he was too old to hold the most demanding public office.
But he also added: [about the outcome in November]. With two historically unpopular candidates, it feels less stable than it appears on the surface. Still, he insisted that Democrats’ best chance of winning today “would be to find another candidate.”
Greenberg also pointed to the unpredictable environment and emphasized his belief that past indicators are not necessarily reliable indicators this year. Never before has a presidential candidate faced the possibility of splitting time between court cases and campaigning. So far, the indictments have helped President Trump more than hurt him, at least among his Republican base. Polls show a conviction could change the minds of some voters. But will it?
President Trump will soon appear in a New York court on charges of paying hush money to an adult film actress and falsifying business records to cover it up. Whether any of the lawsuits related to his efforts to overturn the election or his mishandling of classified documents will go to trial before the election is an open question, pending arguments before the Supreme Court and the justices. ing. A subsequent ruling will determine whether Trump will be granted immunity from prosecution as he claimed.
By many indicators, public memories of the chaos of the Trump era are fading. “One thing is clear,” says Sara Longwell, a “never Trump” Republican strategist. “right now, [voters are] We’re very focused on Joe Biden. They know what they don’t like about Joe Biden. But they’ve forgotten what they don’t like about Donald Trump. They don’t have the same visceral disdain for him that I saw during the 2020 election. ”
Things will change in the coming months if the Biden campaign has anything to say about this, but it is likely that the campaign through surrogates and paid media across many platforms has significantly stepped up and aggressively Only if the president takes up the fight, his allies say. to his opponent.
Trump faced a number of credible opponents in his bid to win the nomination, but he defeated them all, with the exception of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, whose future as a candidate will likely depend on the final outcome of Super Tuesday. Ta. Mr. Biden rolled through the early states without much opposition from a challenge from Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.).
But even if the primaries didn’t bring any big surprises, they helped identify potential problems for Trump, especially with college-educated and suburban voters.
Haley’s candidacy shows that some in the Republican Party clearly have misgivings about Trump. Longwell noted that roughly the same percentage of Republican voters who believe Biden was legitimately elected support Haley, with between a quarter and a third of Republican voters supporting her. He pointed out that there is.
“You can see the general outline of a 70-30 split within the party,” she said. “The question becomes, how many of them will end up supporting Mr. Trump, how many of them will ultimately support Mr. Biden, will they stay home or will they leave the country?” [the presidential ballot] Blank. “
The Democratic coalition that elected Biden in 2020 has softened. Young voters and working-class people of color appear to be less enthusiastic about the president, raising questions about whether enough will turn out to vote. The war in Gaza has divided Democratic opinion, with many on the left saying Biden has done too little to rein in the Israeli government and military, protect Palestinian civilians in combat zones and end the humanitarian crisis. In my view, this is far too insufficient to alleviate the situation.
Some see the nearly 100,000 “irresponsible” votes in Michigan’s Democratic primary last week as a real red flag for Biden. But others downplay its significance, pointing to the state’s history of irresponsible voting in primaries. But no one doubts that Democrats need to work to ensure all voters come to the polls in November.
Haley voters, especially those who identify as suburbanites, will be a special target for the Trump and Biden campaigns. These voters appear to be conflicted about their choices and are not satisfied with either their party’s leadership or the Democratic president. But there are voters within the Democratic coalition with similarly contradictory views, dissatisfied with Biden and wary of Trump. “That’s why it’s going to be an election of double suspicion,” Longwell said.
For both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the formula for winning support from voters dissatisfied with their choices is to make the other candidate even more unpalatable, and so for several months It is expected that the negative campaign will continue relentlessly. In 2022, Democrats could win this debate by focusing voters on the extremism of pro-Trump candidates and the pro-Trump Republican Party, rather than dissatisfaction with Biden.
A grueling eight-month election campaign awaits.
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