The 2024 election is coming.
And right now, it’s Advantage: Trump.
Trump is leading by 2.2% in the RealClearPolitics polling average. That doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize that Trump trailed Joe Biden in the same average on election day 2020 by 7.2% — and only lost by 4.5%. Or that Hillary Clinton was leading in the same average by 3.2% on election day 2016 — and only won the popular vote by 2.1%. In other words, Trump almost always outdraws his polling number.
What’s more, Biden is stuck. Yesterday, political scientist Ruy Teixeira, who is no Right-winger, wrote an article in the Washington Post, saying, “In his 2020 campaign for the nomination, the longtime former senator had a better sense than other Democratic candidates of the normalcy that voters were looking for after more than six months of a pandemic, accompanied by lockdowns and an economic crash. … But there was a catch. After he clinched the nomination, he felt it was necessary to incorporate the views of the party’s left into his campaign’s policy stances and outlook. … Now, with the next campaign about to begin, Biden and his party are struggling.”
In other words, Biden lied to voters: He campaigned as a moderate in the primaries, capitalized on that image in the general while pushing steadily to the Left, and then governed from the Left. Now, says Teixeira, “Biden is polling behind Trump nationally and in every swing state, with the possible exception of Wisconsin. Trump is preferred to Biden by wide margins on voters’ most important issue, the economy and inflation, as well as their second most important issue, immigration and border security, and on crime and public safety. Biden’s approval rating at this point in his presidency is the lowest of any president going back to the 1940s, when the era of modern polling began.”
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So, what can Biden do to turn that around?
Biden thinks that Trump-bashing will save him.
That’s presumably why he’s going to go on a Trump-bashing tour beginning this week, labeling Trump a racist and a fascist. The Associated Press has outlined this plan:
President Joe Biden is starting the campaign year by evoking the Revolutionary War to mark the third anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and visiting the South Carolina church where a white gunman massacred Black parishioners — seeking to present in the starkest possible terms an election he argues could determine the fate of American democracy.
On Friday, Biden will travel to near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington and the Continental Army spent a bleak winter nearly 250 years ago. There, he’ll decry former President Donald Trump for the riot by a mob of his supporters who overran the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Two days later, the president will visit Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, where nine people were shot and killed in a June 2015 white supremacist attack.
Biden’s kicking off 2024 by delving into some of the country’s darkest moments rather than an upbeat affirmation of his record is meant to clarify for voters what his team sees as the stakes of November’s election. During both events, he will characterize his predecessor as a serious threat to the nation’s founding principles, arguing that Trump — who has built a commanding early lead in the Republican presidential primary — will seek to undermine U.S. democracy should he win a second term.
This isn’t likely to work. At all.
It’s unlikely to work — because everyone knows Trump. Everyone also knows that Trump’s 2020 post-election activities didn’t change the outcome of the election — Biden, after all, is president. What’s more, the pitch that Trump is more racist than Biden doesn’t work. Biden is the DEI president.
The pitch that Trump is a fascist won’t work either because as even George Will, a Trump opponent of high pitch, points out, “Joe Biden is, like Trump, an authoritarian recidivist mostly stymied by courts.”
That’s from a Trump opponent. As Will says, “Instances of Trump’s anti-constitutional behavior have been amply reported and deplored. Biden’s, less so — although they (e.g., the eviction moratorium, the vaccine mandate, the cancellation of student debt), and judicial reprimands of them, have been frequent. Now, consider the lack of attention to his contempt for the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, and the Senate majority’s supine complicity.”
Most of all, Biden’s hope that hatred for Trump will somehow save him is predicated on the idea that heavy turnout against Trump is a foregone conclusion. But … what if it’s not? What if the actual norm is that Trump doesn’t drive turnout in the way Biden hopes? In 2016, after all, turnout was within historical norms: When it comes to turnout as percentage of eligible voters, here are the numbers by election:
2000: 54.3%
2004: 60.1%
2008: 62.5%
2012: 58.0%
2016: 59.2%
2020: 66.9%
That last number is a massive outlier. 2020 saw a voter increase of 23 million, to 160 million total voters — as opposed to 137 million in 2016 and 129 million in 2012.
Do we really think that number will replicate? If it doesn’t, who will those marginal voters come from — Biden or Trump?
This means Biden is going to have to actually succeed in order to win.
The only thing that might save him would be … you know, good things happening in America.
But his own policies prevent just that.
