One Year Out from Election 2024

Graphic courtesy of Anadolu Agency

In lieu of a week ahead summary, I thought it might be helpful to discuss how things look a year out from the national election. Polls have folks very much on edge, which I suppose is part of the point, and today’s bad battleground state poll for Biden by the New York Times / Siena is sure to cause much handwringing. The thought of a repeat of Donald Trump is enough to raise the blood pressure of any voter who values the rule of law, pluralism and our democratic institutions.

So am I losing sleep over it?

In a word, no.

Allow me to paint some pretty big pictures using a necessarily broad brush. I wouldn’t call what I feel “confidence,” but I would consider my thinking “well-supported by available data.”

So why don’t I think Donald Trump will win in 2024? Here are some big reasons.

Trump didn’t win in 2020. Why does this matter? The math, for starters. Trump’s base is smaller than it used to be and shrinking every year. In order to succeed where he failed in 2020, by definition Trump would have to pick up more voters than he had in the last election. But instead of spending his time in office trying to reach more centrist voters, Trump played to his base and to extremism. It has only gotten worse since he left office.

MAGA voters may be enthusiastic, but they do not on their own make up a majority in any swing state. And demographic trends and the march of time make Trump’s job all the more difficult. The electorate is far younger than it was when Trump stood for election in 2016 and 2020, and the biggest group of his supporters has shrunk markedly. As the Washington Post bluntly put it,

Every year, about 4 million Americans turn 18 and gain the right to vote. In the eight years between the 2016 and 2024 elections, that’s 32 million new eligible voters.

Also every year, 2½ million older Americans die. So in the same eight years, that’s as many as 20 million fewer older voters.

We should add to this the fact that younger voters, who lean near 70 percent Democratic, are turning out in very high numbers, as they have in every election since Trump first took office.

Trump looks weaker in the key battlegrounds. In the critical swing states, namely Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, Democrats performed well in the 2022 midterms—better than they did in the rest of the country. Importantly, the voters who gave Democrats statewide wins in each of these states aren’t going away. They’ll be back in 2024, no doubt in greater numbers.

Meanwhile, the GOP state party apparatuses in many of these critical battlegrounds, such as Michigan, are in shambles, and they are often led by MAGA extremists. That will make it hard for the GOP to flip at least three of these states from blue in 2024. Not impossible, but hard. I’d much rather be us than them, looking at the state of things.

Trump likely will be running as a convicted criminal. In three months, jury selection will begin in D.C. for the federal case against Trump for conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. This is no doubt a special case, with the possibility that politics will taint the jury. But even accounting for that, it remains very likely Trump will be convicted in that case.

If he is, that will cause a huge crisis in the GOP. At their national convention, they will be either forced to nominate a convicted criminal—and for a sizable number of voters, that’s a bridge too far—or they will fail to nominate him, which will likely lead Trump to attack the GOP and cause millions of MAGA faithful to stay home or vote for a third party candidate.

The economy isn’t collapsing. We can debate whether the economy is strong and delivering for enough people, whether inflation is still high for key goods and services, or whether consumer confidence is misplaced. But what no one is talking about, but which was on the expectations list of nearly every economist and banker in 2022, is a recession.

With the GDP chugging along at 4.9 percent in the latest quarter, we are experiencing one of the highest growth rates we’ve seen in some time. The idea that the economy was going to go into the toilet in late 2023 was simply dead wrong. Meanwhile, the huge investments the Biden administration has made in manufacturing and infrastructure will continue to pay dividends and raise wages at the lower end of the scale, especially among non-college educated Americans. That is the same demographic who had felt abandoned by the Democrats and voted for Trump in large numbers in 2016.

Special elections show a clear, favorable pattern. I don’t care much about polls this far out, but I do care about special elections. They give us the most reliable data about how people are actually voting. And in those special elections, Democrats have been crushing it.

In state legislative special elections, for example, Democrats have been overperforming by an average of 7 points, according to an internal Democratic study. And overall, including congressional special races, Democrats have won by margins 11 points higher than the partisan lean of their districts. That’s a fancy way of saying Democrats are showing up and voting much higher than Republicans are.

Democrats are motivated. Abortion rights, voter suppression, MAGA extremism and gun violence are driving voters to action and to the polls. We saw examples of the power of a motivated, progressive left in Wisconsin in 2023, when Justice Janet Protasiewicz defeated an extremist by a whopping 11 points, in a state where elections are usually decided by a single digit. We may see it in action this coming Tuesday in a referendum in Ohio on abortion.

Republicans are fracturing. It’s hard to witness the dysfunction and disunity in the House GOP conference and not see it for what it is: a symptom of deep party schism. The GOP has become a Christian nationalist, pro-authoritarian party, and there’s no longer room for traditional, conservative or moderate Republicans. There’s only extremism. That boiled over recently when more traditional Republicans opposed the Speakership of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and were hit with death threats and intimidation of family members.

While it’s true that Democrats are currently painfully split over policy in Israel and Gaza, this pales next to the existential question facing GOP voters. Will they continue to support a party that does not believe in or practice fundamental American values such as the rule of law, separation of church and state, and democracy? Or will they flee the party or cast crossover votes as so many did in 2022? With Trump there is no longer any gray area.

We shouldn’t be confident, just determined

The world of course is an unpredictable place. No one expected a terrorist attack and resulting bloody war in Gaza a month ago. There’s a raging war in Ukraine and tensions over Taiwan. The government might shut down in two weeks over a failure of Republican leadership. Inflation could creep back up. When uncertain voters come at me with a list of horribles, though, I say, “Wouldn’t you much rather have someone steady and experienced like Joe Biden dealing with all this chaos?”

But let’s return to the data and the fundamentals: favorable demographic trends, strong Democratic performance in the battlegrounds in 2022, legal jeopardy for Trump, no recession in sight, a stellar record in special elections, motivated Democratic voters and a fractured GOP.

Against all of that, the most oft-repeated criticism of Biden is his advanced age, even though Trump is just behind him and showing far greater signs of cognitive decline, making it difficult for Trump to use this line of attack.

The fact that the race is Biden’s to lose doesn’t in any way mean that we can stop or rest. As I said earlier, I wouldn’t say I am confident, only buoyed by the data and the current state of the race. We will need all hands available in the coming year, because it is no exaggeration to state that our entire American national experiment—which has experienced a civil war, two world wars, a civil rights awakening and now the rise of American fascism—is squarely on the line. Not one of us can afford to sit this out.

But for today, a year out, I wish to emphasize the many positive signs so that we aren’t all exhausted by anxiety and stress.

Things are going our way. If we take this energy to the finish line, we will win. Perhaps even resoundingly.

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