If you are freaked out that Donald Trump might be elected president again, don't panic.
President Joe Biden’s approval rating may be an all-time low of 37 percent. Trump may be trouncing him by five points in a hypothetical rematch. And Biden’s age looks to be the “But her emails” of the next year’s campaign.
But the motto of Bill Clinton’s winning presidential campaign in 1992 still holds true today: “It’s the economy, stupid.” If employment and wages hold up and inflation ticks down, Biden should emerge victorious after the polls close on Nov. 5, 2024.
Here’s why: While 80 percent of Americans say the country is out of control, given mass shootings, disinformation, extreme weather, and just plain extremism, presidential races are depressingly predictable. Even accounting for the 2016 shocker that brought Trump to power, there are a few hard rules that significantly favor Biden so long as economic fundamentals don’t erode.
His incumbency is a big plus. Everyone has made up their mind about Biden. It is nearly impossible for the GOP to swiftboat him even if Trump is looking to hire the architect of the smear campaign that hobbled the 2004 Democratic Party nominee, John Kerry.
Save for token opposition, the primary field is clear for Biden. A strong sign of a weak incumbent is a serious threat from the flanks, such as Ted Kennedy challenging Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Pat Buchanan taking on George H.W. Bush in 1992. It indicates the base is unhappy, and the discontent carries over into November. In the case of Carter and Bush, both won the primaries only to be trounced in the general election.
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So far the Democratic Party competition to Biden is from the fringe. Marianne Williamson, the “high priestess of pop religion,” may draw progressives pining for Bernie Sanders, who has ruled out again running for the White House. But her schtick that “love will save the world” will be scorned as out-of-touch for voters struggling with bills. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has sterling name recognition but it will be as toxic as an Ohio train wreck after voters learn not just about his anti-vaxxer stance, but his association with ghouls like Steve Bannon, Alex Jones and Roger Stone. If anything, Biden’s campaign will use the two as foils to burnish his image as a sober statesman who will “finish the job” of improving health care, bolstering manufacturing and improving the lives of America’s middle class.
Carter and Bush both lost because the economy fell into punishing recessions on their watches. This is a real risk for Biden. Corporate profiteering and U.S. sanctions that have choked Russia’s massive exports of food, fuel, and fertilizer have stoked inflationary fires. The Federal Reserve has ratcheted up interest rates in response. Their strategy is to rein in consumer demand and high prices by throwing millions of Americans out of work. If the economy contracts or just stagnates that could imperil Biden’s re-election no matter who the Republicans nominate.
On the other hand, the economy could improve as inflation is dropping. That leaves a colossal blunder as the other significant risk. In 1980, Carter’s economic woes were compounded by a foreign policy disaster that played into Ronald Reagan’s bombastic militarism. Carter gave the Shah of Iran refuge in the United States after decades of brutal rule. In retaliation, the revolutionary Islamic regime made Carter look weak by seizing 52 Americans from the U.S. embassy a year before the election and holding them hostage for 444 days.
For Trump, the only other elected incumbent in nearly a hundred years to lose a re-election bid, the economy did not sink him. It was his floundering response to the COVID-19 pandemic that helped deep-six his campaign.
Trump himself is a yuge advantage to Biden. Trump will likely muscle his way to a third straight GOP nomination and a fourth straight electoral loss when accounting for his 2020 flameout and disastrous 2018 and 2022 midterms. His grip on Republican voters looked weak after many of his handpicked candidates lost — some badly — in the 2022 midterms.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was supposed to be the new-and-improved Trump: all of the cruelty but none of the baggage. Lacking charisma, fighting Mickey Mouse and fresh off a blunder-filled trip around the world, his star is already fading. DeSantis also can’t figure out how to handle Trump, whose savage instincts are as sharp as ever — fouling DeSantis hilariously with nicknames such as “Meatball Ron” and the vulgar “Pudding Fingers” ad.
Trump doesn’t have a sure lock on the nomination like Biden, but he looks strong enough that Mitch McConnell is already trying to Trump-proof senate races. His supporters are so devoted that other candidates’ best shot at grabbing the brass ring is Trump “having a heart attack on a golf course.” And his support is so wide, he racks up 62 percent support among Republicans, whereas six high-profile challengers net only 34 percent combined.
Trump, however, is rancid wine in an old bottle. The fizz and novelty that lofted him to victory in 2016 has dissipated. All he has is caustic vengeance, and that translates to a dismal 25 percent approval rating among all voters.
These are not the ingredients for a general election victory, when a Republican must convince many independents and even some disaffected Democrats to vote for them, too.
A Biden-Trump race is the rematch no one wants — and the one Biden needs. Inflation and tepid economic growth is his Achilles’ heel. Biden’s approval rating tracks the economy, particularly gas prices. But a rematch means the election will be a referendum on Trump, not the incumbent, which is normally the case. Even if 71 percent of the public says the country is on the wrong track, millions of voters will panic at the thought of enduring four years of chaos, malevolence, violence and the toxic cloud that is Trump’s ego. They will reluctantly pull the lever for Biden.
On top of that handicap, Trump’s legacy will haunt him and any other Republican nominee. Having placed three Supreme Court justices who nullified Roe v. Wade last June, Trump can’t run away from millions of women angered at being reduced to second-class citizens. In race after race since last November, opposition to the right-wing assault on abortion rights has handed the Democrats victories even against fierce economic headwinds.
A normal party would embrace moderation. But the GOP is not a normal party. Beholden to white evangelical zealots who accounted for nearly half of Trump’s winning coalition in 2016, Republicans are doubling down on banning reproductive rights. The extremism is amplified by right-wing media and social media that reward the loudest, angriest voices and brooke no nuance. To win the GOP nomination, candidates must placate fanatics. That’s why DeSantis signed a state law banning abortion after six weeks that is so unpopular 61 percent of Florida Republicans oppose it, damaging his national standing.
The biggest enemy for the Democrats is complacency. That did in Hillary Clinton in 2016. With astonishing arrogance, her campaign left firewall states unprotected in favor of pouring vast effort into Ohio, Florida and North Carolina: states she didn’t need and had little chance of winning. Biden’s 2020 campaign repeated many unforced errors from 2016, dropping more than half-a-billion dollars on television advertising that sways few voters, while waiting inordinately long, a month before the election, to begin the get-out-the-vote effort even accounting for the pandemic.
Biden also risks reproducing another major failing of Clinton: a 7.1 percent plunge in Black turnout in 2016 versus 2012. After eight years of Obama, many Black voters saw little improvement in their lives and the excitement of the first Black president had long since faded. The heavy reliance on Black voters is a structural flaw for Democrats. They surf a wave of Black enthusiasm to the White House, but once in office Democrats do little to uplift African-Americans, which saps their enthusiasm down the road.
The final obstacle Biden has to contend with is not so much his age but bothsidesism. When confronted by the dark force of Trumpism, mainstream journalists search for issues to hammer Democrats, like Clinton’s emails, in a misguided attempt to show they are evenhanded. That’s not to say Biden’s age should be off-limits. But Trump will be 77 years old in June, and he would surpass Biden as the oldest president ever if he served a full term. Additionally, Biden may be slowing and he has a well-known stutter, but those are not mental impairments.
It’s also a virtual certainty there will be an underground inferno of deceptive videos and AI deep fakes featuring an ailing Biden that combine with Republicans openly questioning his mental capacity which will spread like wildfire and jump into the legacy media. It’s an open question if journalists realize that debunking fake claims helps to spread them.
The final factor is Black Swan events. These include the pandemic in 2020, the Wall Street meltdown in 2008, or the Iran hostage crisis in 1980. Possible wildcards this election include the use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine or a deadly clash with China. But because Black Swan events are inherently unpredictable, there’s no use worrying about them.
In the end, Biden’s north star must be economic recovery and stability — while staving off Republicans in Congress cynically trying to scuttle the economy for political gain. (Take the looming debt ceiling debacle, for example.) And even then, Biden’s campaign has to excite voters enough to account for any dirty tricks and dark arts employed by Trump and his minions.
Nonetheless, Biden is a healthy favorite in election prediction markets, which is a good indicator of the advantages he enjoys and voters’ fears of a return to Trumpism. It’s his election to win, as long as he remembers that it’s still the economy, stupid.
