On the menu today: All the reasons why the 2024 battle between Joe Biden and Donald Trump isn’t really a rerun of 2020; why President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan isn’t quite as consequential as his decisions on spending, the border, and Iran; and a new poll of South Carolina Republicans measures Nikki Haley’s support in her home state.
2020 vs. 2024
Yes, the 2024 presidential election is extremely likely to be a rematch between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump. But despite the groaning about those two options again, and how we’re stuck with two grumpy old men destined for another bout of incoherent shouting and crosstalk on a debate stage, this coming election cycle is going to be different than the last one. It may well be worse. You could fairly argue that both Biden and Trump are weaker candidates now than they were three years ago. But a lot has changed in the past three years.
Let’s start with the issue environment. Most notably, the country is not in the middle of a global pandemic right now. Think about all the different ways the pandemic affected the election: Trump’s hospitalization, the cancellation of the third presidential debate, Biden’s “basement campaign.” In March 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump’s job-approval rating hit 49 percent, tying the highest of his presidency, which he had reached in January and February as well. The economy was humming along, wages were growing; there was a strong case that Trump was on his way to a reelection victory.
The process of how Americans vote is going to be different this cycle. Pew Research found that a slim majority of voters (54 percent) said they voted in person in 2020, while 46 percent voted by absentee or mail-in ballot. About one-quarter (27 percent) reported having voted in person on Election Day, and an identical share said they voted in person before Election Day. A separate report by the U.S. Census Bureau found, “In the 2020 election, 69 percent of voters nationwide cast their ballot nontraditionally — by mail and/or before Election Day.” Voting by mail and absentee will no doubt remain significant in 2024, but fewer Americans will use that option in 2024, now that they have fewer reasons to avoid crowds.
Is America in better shape now than it was three years ago, when the pandemic turned our lives upside down? It sure is nice to travel, gather in groups, have restaurants open, go to the movies, have no nattering nabobs enforcing social distancing, and have fans in the stands of sports events and concerts. Sure, by that standard, life is back to “normal.” We also haven’t had many major riots in our cities lately.
But we’ve traded one set of problems for another: high prices for everything from mortgages to rent to groceries to restaurant meals to gasoline to home heating to electricity to furniture; massive waves of migrants coming across the border and straining resources in cities from coast to coast; diminished public faith in the leaders of a variety of fields and professions.
It’s a different Biden. On paper, we all age at the same pace, one day every 24 hours. But the Oval Office ages every man who sits behind the Resolute Desk, and we can see it in Biden’s face, shuffling gait, and weaker voice. Or at least we can see it during Biden’s increasingly rarer and briefer public appearances. It’s troubling enough to have a president who is a near-octogenarian, but we have a president who turns 82 shortly after Election Day. Forget independents and Republicans; in December, 40 percent of Democrats told CBS News that Biden shouldn’t run for another term, and 93 percent of those who felt that way said the reason was his age.
Biden’s job-approval rating is abysmal — 41 percent in YouGov, 35 percent in Civiqs, 39 percent in Quinnipiac, and 33 percent in the Pew Research Center survey. Americans of all political stripes recognize that what they were promised on the campaign trail in 2020 and what they have gotten since then are two different things.
The man who boasted, “Putin knows that if I am president of the United States his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over,” is now struggling to get congressional Republicans to sign on to any additional arms transfers to Ukraine. The man who pledged to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” later traveled to Riyadh to fist-bump Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden called Xi Jinping “a thug”; fast forward to late 2023, and Biden was warmly hosting Xi in a cleaned-up San Francisco. Biden seemed to think that as president on the world stage, he would be as intimidating as Jack Reacher. He’s turned out to be about as intimidating as Barney Fife.
Also, back in 2020, Democrats could tell themselves that then-senator Kamala Harris was likely to grow into the job of vice president and would be a serious presidential candidate soon. We know Democrats have little to no faith in Harris’s ability to win on her own now, because if they did, they would be calling for Biden to serve one term and for Harris to be the 2024 Democratic nominee.
(You know why there’s such fervent speculation about whom Trump will select as his running mate, besides the fact that Trump’s choice could be a 78-year-old’s heartbeat away from the presidency? Because that person will be the only fresh face on the ballot between the two major-party tickets.)
It’s a different Trump. Trump is also three years older, and some argue that he’s even more erratic, angry, vindictive, and obsessive today than he was as president. He certainly will have more yes-men and sycophants around him now than during his time as president. Trump had high negative ratings heading into Election Day 2020, and then his entire response to losing the election, and the riot of January 6, made even more Americans detest him. Trump left office with a job-approval rating of 34 percent, the lowest of his presidency. Trump’s favorability among the electorate has rebounded a bit — his current average is around 43 percent — but he’s still running with more baggage than the carousels at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. There is an intriguing theory that the decision to de-platform Trump from social-media sites such as Twitter after January 6 actually did Trump a favor by keeping his immature, repellent tantrums away from a broader audience. As Trump settles into the role of the 2024 Republican nominee, it is unlikely this beneficial effect will wither away.
Trump is now facing 91 felony counts across four criminal trials, which is arguably one of his biggest strengths in his Republican primary battle. (Indeed, you can fairly argue that with political enemies such as Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis, who needs friends?) The Trump 2024 campaign is very much about the man himself, what he symbolizes, the reaction he spurred in his political enemies, and whether the entire U.S. system of government (and particularly the criminal-justice system) has been twisted and corrupted in a far-reaching effort to keep him out of the Oval Office. Trump is effectively asking the American electorate to validate his conspiratorial view of the world.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. When pollsters offer RFK Jr. as an option in their national presidential polling, the independent candidate does fairly well in a three-way race: 21 percent in the Harvard-Harris survey, 18 percent in Reuters-Ipsos, 22 percent in Quinnipiac, 16 percent in Rasmussen. That’s not likely to be enough to win any state, but if Kennedy finished in that range, he would be the strongest third-party candidate since H. Ross Perot in 1992. (It would also likely mean that whoever wins the presidency this year will win with the smallest plurality since Bill Clinton’s 43 percent that year.)
But to achieve those numbers, RFK Jr. needs to get on the ballot in as many states as possible, ideally all 50.
Note that Kennedy is exploring the option of running as the Libertarian nominee, which I would contend would make him the least libertarian Libertarian presidential nominee of all time:
RFK Jr.’s worldview is a shambolic collection of tasteless Holocaust metaphors, sinister conspiracies contending that vaccines and 5G high-speed-transmission towers are tools for subjugating the population, and authoritarian impulses. He now says that he opposes gun control, but, in 2018, he stated, “Parkland students are right; the NRA is a terror group.” He wanted to ban ExxonMobil from operating in New York State because he contended that it misled the public about climate change. He has called for the Koch brothers to be tried at The Hague as war criminals, and DeSantis’s memory is correct: Kennedy said he wished there was a law that would allow him to punish climate-change skepticism. He argued that state attorneys general should revoke the charters of the American Enterprise Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute because they were “oil-industry surrogates.” He now wishes for voters to see him as a defender of the First Amendment.
We should also note the potential independent candidacy of some candidate to be named later from No Labels. This effort is getting a little stranger as we proceed into 2024, because No Labels has stated that they intend to nominate a ticket of one Republican and one Democrat, but they don’t know which figures yet. They also don’t know how they’re going to select those candidates. They also don’t know when they’re going to select those candidates, other than to say they will evaluate the political landscape after Super Tuesday. No Labels is like the J. J. Abrams “Mystery Box” of political entities.
ADDENDA: Yesterday, I wrote in a Corner post:
Joe Biden has made three major decisions as president. The first was to spend trillions as the economy was recovering from the Covid pandemic. . . . The second was to enact a series of changes to U.S. border and immigration policy that were interpreted by many, many migrants from Central America and around the world as an announcement that the U.S. had an open-borders policy. . . . [The third was] to attempt to reach out to the Iranian regime and rescind Trump-era sanctions on that country.
A lot of folks, including some of my colleagues, argued that Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan belonged on that list, and that it outranked some of the others. Jeff Jacoby argues the Afghanistan withdrawal was more important than any of those other decisions.
You can argue that the Afghanistan withdrawal likely signaled to Vladimir Putin that he would face minimal consequences for invading and attempting to conquer Ukraine, and yes, that’s a pretty darn big consequence.
But the Afghanistan withdrawal is less consequential to whether Biden will be a two-term president than the other decisions. Saying that the Afghanistan withdrawal was not as consequential as Biden’s decisions on spending, the border, and Iran doesn’t mean that it wasn’t consequential at all. But the Afghanistan withdrawal does not loom in the public mind, and it hasn’t done so since 2022 at the latest. When’s the last time the average American thought about Afghanistan? Check any pollster — Gallup, Pew, YouGov — and when Americans are asked what the most important issues facing the country are, Afghanistan is almost never mentioned. (As far as I can tell, YouGov stopped asking about the topic in 2020.) Again, I’m not saying Americans should not think about Afghanistan, I’m saying that they don’t.
A Fabrizio and Lee survey of likely South Carolina Republican primary voters, conducted on behalf of Make American Great Again PAC Inc., finds Trump at 66 percent and Haley at 31 percent. At first glance, that’s a crushing 35-point margin. Then again, the same pollster surveying the same state about eleven days earlier had Trump ahead, 68 percent to 28 percent. In a couple of weeks, Trump’s going to declare the party is unified behind him in the Palmetto State, when it’s more accurate that about two-thirds of the party is unified behind him.