If these are the options, there won’t be much anybody can do besides pray.
Can Donald Trump win the general election in 2024? Rich and CNN’s Harry Enten say yes, Andy and the Washington Post‘s Henry Olsen say no, Michael says maybe. I’m closer to a no than a maybe, but I’d caution against thinking another Trump term is impossible as opposed to highly unlikely. Here is how I see the race, in big-picture terms.
First, Joe Biden can’t win — or rather, he can’t do anything to win:
- Biden’s age-related decline has passed the point where he is no longer capable of helping himself by speaking, campaigning, or debating. The best he can do on his best days is leave people a little less concerned that he’s senile and incapacitated; he’s not persuasive or impressive.
- Biden’s image is largely settled by now with the public, and it’s bad. A majority of Americans think he’s too old for the job, and old doesn’t get better, it only gets worse.
- Biden has few levers of power left with which to effect change. The Republican takeover of the House killed any chance of more party-line policy-making. House Republicans haven’t played along with Biden’s hopes of using them as a foil. Unlike Clinton in 1995, Biden has neither the inclination nor the leash within his own party to do bipartisan deals to make himself look more moderate. Biden has shot a lot of his bolts for unilateral executive action, he’s out of excuses to use pandemic emergency powers, and most of the things he’d like to do are illegal and would be stopped by the courts. The state of the economy and, to a large extent, the battlefield conditions in Ukraine are already both mostly baked-in through 2024 — there may be surprises, but not upsides that Biden can create.
- Biden also has few options personnel-wise. Most notably, picking Kamala Harris because of her race and gender means that Biden can’t jettison her. I do think the recent decision to turn her loose as an attack dog is a rational assessment that she has only two gears, shameless, dishonest demagoguery or idiotic platitudes, and she’s more useful doing the former.
What that means is that Biden is a prisoner of events he mostly can’t control. Some of those events may help him, but others (such as the mounting legal and ethical troubles of Hunter and the family) can only hurt. It doesn’t mean Biden is doomed to lose — but if he’s reelected, it will be because his opponent was worse. Which is also why Biden has a huge incentive to do whatever remains in his power to help pick the opponent he is best situated to beat: Trump.
Second, Donald Trump also can’t really do much, if anything, to win:
- Trump is the most famous man in America. He’s been a larger-than-life national figure for more than three decades. Even out of office, he has largely managed to eclipse Biden as the main character in American politics. The political press can’t get enough of him. He’s legendarily combative and divisive. All of which is to say that everybody already has a strong opinion about Donald Trump. And aside from a truly massive event (such as January 6, which really did alienate some people who had previously liked or tolerated Trump), it is nearly impossible to change those opinions.
- As a result, Trump has not just a hard ceiling, around 47 percent of the national electorate, but an accumulated array of enemies among the voters of key states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin that were essential to his 2016 victory and that he lost in 2020. There is very little room to maneuver on the electoral map.
- Trump isn’t young, either. He’s 77 and prone to looking more tired and less fun than he has in the past. Even aside from his obsession with the “rigged” 2020 election, he no longer has the flexibility he had in 2016 as an outsider with no record, and everybody knows what’s coming from him, so he’s lost the capacity to surprise.
- Trump, like Biden, has limited personnel options but for different reasons: He’s alienated, burned out, or blacklisted so many people, and lots of others have seen what dreadful things lie down the road from working for Trump. That means Trump’s campaign and surrogates are staffed with C- and D-list people.
- However much they may help cement the loyalty of his devoted followers, the various legal proceedings against Trump are (as Andy and Henry Olsen both detail) a drain on Trump’s liberty. They will consume his time and attention and a lot of the money he’d otherwise expect to devote to reaching, persuading, and mobilizing voters. They will also produce an endless stream of images of Trump in the grip of the law, as well as headlines about the criminal cases and civil verdicts against him.
Again, none of this means it is impossible for Trump to win. The strength of partisanship these days is such that it’s incredibly difficult to drive a modern major-party presidential candidate below 45 percent of the vote or much below 200 electoral votes. Biden’s health could very easily deteriorate so badly that Americans pick Trump because he’s literally the last man standing. But, like Biden, Trump’s appeal is limited and his ability to do anything to expand it is nearly nonexistent. He, like Biden, can only await events.
These don’t have to be the only choices, and we still don’t know if there will be a third-party entrant who breaks out of the margins. But Democratic voters aren’t being offered a genuinely serious alternative to Biden, and Republican voters thus far seem unwilling to abandon Trump. If those are the options, there won’t be much anybody can do besides pray.