One of my gut feelings for this election cycle is that Joe Biden will not win any state in 2024 that he didn’t win in 2020. I know, Democrats keep insisting that North Carolina will be in play, and as discussed in today’s Morning Jolt, Democrats believe the abortion issue gives them a chance at winning Florida.
One reason I am so skeptical is that I think the Joe Biden of 2024 is a significantly weaker candidate than he was in 2020. First and foremost, he’s no longer approaching his eighties, he turns 82 shortly after Election Day and an overwhelming majority of Americans think he’s just too old to serve another term. Secondly, Biden has a record as president now, and Americans are unimpressed, disappointed, and frustrated with the job Biden is doing. Nor is this some temporary slump; Biden’s job approval number has been around 40 to 45 percent since late 2021.
And finally, Americans just don’t think as highly of Biden as they did four years ago on a wide variety of desired qualities. Today Gallup offered some new numbers to back up this contention.
Americans are less likely now than they were in 2020 to believe a number of positive personal qualities and characteristics apply to President Joe Biden. The biggest decline has come in the percentage believing Biden is able to manage government effectively, but his scores are down at least six percentage points on each characteristic. Over the same period, public impressions of Donald Trump, Biden’s likely challenger in the 2024 election, haven’t changed to a statically significant degree.
Back in 2020, 66 percent of Americans told Gallup that Biden was likeable; that is down to 57 percent now. Four years ago, 49 percent of Americans believed Biden “displays good judgment in a crisis,” now just 40 percent feel the same way. In 2020, 46 percent saw Biden as a “strong and decisive leader,” and now just 38 percent do. Four years ago, 55 percent believed Biden “cares about the needs of people like you,” and that figure is down to 48 percent now. Finally, four years ago, 52 percent found Biden to be honest and trustworthy, and that figure is down to 46 percent now.
Not great, and a not a formula for winning states that didn’t prefer Biden last time around.
The other safe point about my contention that Biden will not win any state in 2024 that he didn’t win in 2020 is that Biden picked just about all the lowest hanging fruit last cycle. After North Carolina and Florida, the next closest state, measuring by percentages of the vote, was Texas, where Trump beat Biden, 52 percent to 46.8 percent. (That is a margin of more than 631,000 votes.)
By vote margin, the closest state that Trump won was Maine’s second congressional district, which he won by more than 27,000 votes.
Anything could happen, and it’s conceivable that Trump, who will be 78 on Election Day, will be a weaker candidate than four years ago, too. But it is likely that Biden will finish with fewer electoral votes than last cycle. In 2020, Biden finished with 306 electoral votes and Trump finished with 232. If every state voted the same way as in 2020, Trump would finish with three more electoral votes, because the red states gained congressional seats after the 2020 Census and the blue states lost three seats.