Some Bright Thoughts on Black Friday

An update on my current thoughts on the election next year

Photo: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images

It’s easy to succumb to the doom and gloom. The polls, even in the battleground states, are alarming. Joe Biden’s approval ratings remain stuck in the doldrums with young people and minorities souring on him recently, especially over Gaza. People answering polls somehow still trust Republicans more than Democrats on the economy, despite record low unemployment and huge booms in manufacturing and infrastructure.

Worse still, Donald Trump seems made of teflon. The more awful he acts, the more his base seems to adore and approve of him. The media, meanwhile, seems bent on ignoring the stakes and instead both-sidesing a horse race, one where Biden’s age at 81 is disqualifying, but Trump’s fascism at age 78 is not.

So why do I remain cautiously optimistic that our Republic will survive the next election?

Let me walk through some of my top reasons, in the hopes of putting folks here more at ease. This is an update to an earlier piece I wrote a year out from the 2024 election, so some of this may sound familiar. But I believe it bears repeating so that we get it more firmly drilled into our collective psyche.

Politics comes down to a choice, and Biden is still the better choice

President Biden has the tough responsibility of actually governing and leading. That subjects him to a lot of negative criticism over his decisions and especially his missteps and failures. The press reports dutifully on those errors, and people enter into arguments over policy, with Biden dead center. Meanwhile, good news stories don’t make the headlines because they get far less engagement.

By contrast, Trump has no policies to speak of, just a litany of complaints and threats. He doesn’t have to answer for, or explain them to, the press or to the public. We presently primarily see him only in the context of his combative statements after he emerges from the courthouse. That’s where Trump excels, and there’s no one there who can seriously question him. He has even brazenly avoided appearing in any debates with his GOP rivals, most of whom have declined to take him on publicly, so he doesn’t have to answer any tough questions on any national stage.

That’s all going to change next year as the election comes more into focus. People are going to see Trump in comparison to other choices, whether it’s within his own party against Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis, or in contrast to the president should Trump win the nomination.

The comparisons will be clear. Trump is an extremist. He killed Roe v. Wade. He is an election denialist. He wants to deport 11 million immigrants. And then there’s this:

Trump likely will be convicted by a Washington jury before summer

Since my last broad take, there have been some legal developments that give me reason for optimism. First, several key potential witnesses against Trump have pled guilty in Georgia. They are now cooperating with Fani Willis’s office, and Jack Smith will benefit from that. Second, Judge Tanya Chutkan has begun setting deadlines for the trial. She appears to be aiming to keep that March 2024 trial date.

From 10,000 feet, the prospect of a guilty verdict still looks very likely. Those who have followed me since the 2020 election know I prefer to look at numbers and data. And prosecutors in D.C. have over a 95% conviction rate with defendants. That’s a pretty good baseline from which to start. Trump is not beloved by the populace, and Judge Chutkan is cutting him no special breaks. Now, one of his primary defenses—the so-called advice of counsel argument—looks awfully shaky, especially the guilty pleas by his own campaign’s lawyers.

A quick reminder here: Judges who have looked at the facts after both sides give it their best shot regularly conclude that Trump committed crimes. This includes Judge David Carter of California, who ruled that it was likely that Trump and Eastman committed conspiracy to obstruct Congress and to defraud the U.S., two of the same crimes Trump is charged with in D.C. They include Judge Sarah Wallace of Colorado who last week found that Trump committed incitement of insurrection and intended to disrupt the electoral count. As the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington noted earlier this summer,

In fifteen cases overseen by nine different judges appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents, courts have not minced words in declaring that Trump was the central cause of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, echoing the findings of the bipartisan January 6th Select Committee

And that was before federal criminal charges were even filed.

So that’s the judges. But what about the jury?

Of course, it’s possible that a juror in the D.C. case may break an oath, ignore the evidence established beyond a reasonable doubt, and try to keep Trump out of prison by refusing to convict. But that’s still not an acquittal. That’s a hung jury. Jack Smith could and would retry the case, likely as soon as possible. And the election would still be about whether to elect a man who is almost certainly going to be a convicted felon.

As I have written about in prior pieces, such a guilty verdict is enough to cause a sizable percentage of Republicans to abandon Trump. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in August put that number at 45 percent, but even a 5 percent shift would be seismic.

Moreover, it’s not as if Washington juries are regularly hung by single holdouts. It hasn’t happened yet in the the January 6 defendants’ cases; they are routinely unanimously convicted. And as I wrote about earlier, the long and painstaking process—begun by Attorney General Merrick Garland in the aftermath of the attack—of establishing the contours of the crime of “conspiracy to obstruct Congress” will prove enormously impactful. There are now specific jury instructions and binding legal precedents, for example, about what it means to have “corruptly” attempted to obstruct the electoral count, and it’s not good for Trump.

The economy may not lift Biden, but it won’t hurt him any more than it has

If high inflation, economic uncertainty and high interest rates determined elections, Democrats would have been destroyed in the 2022 midterms. After all, those issues were all present and more troubling than they are today, and likely far worse than they will be by November 2024. Remember, economists and the media were all talking about a near-certain recession by this time.

Instead, voters acknowledged that the economy wasn’t great, but they cared more about protecting abortion rights and blocking extremists than they did the economy when it came to their vote. That was particularly true in the battleground states, where Democrats won the statewide elections in nearly all the races.

There are signs that the prices of some key goods are not only growing less fast but are actually beginning to fall. The D world (Deflation) hasn’t been bandied about in some time, but this week the CEO of Wal-Mart begun using it to describe what he sees for his company’s outlook next year.

Low inflation or even deflation would stay the hand of the Federal Reserve in raising interest rates further. If these actually begin to come down before the election, that will cause the stock market to rally and put more money in the hands of borrowers, even while prices are actually coming down instead of merely rising less quickly.

Compared to the nightmare scenario of a recession heading into the election, this would be a near miraculous outcome.

Ignore the polls and look at actual election results

This point bears repeating: For a number of reasons, polling this far out from the election is not a reliable indicator of where things will be come November. If they were, Mitt Romney would have defeated Barack Obama handily. But it was precisely the other way around in November 2012.

What matters far more to me, as a lover of data and numbers, are actual election results. The midterm elections, the special elections and the general elections over the past two years have been stellar for Democrats, even in deeply red states. And there are two reasons for that: abortion and MAGA extremism.

These are both what I call “wedge” issues for the GOP. They splinter their voter base and cause crossover voting for Democratic candidates and causes. And the GOP has not figured out how to avoid being wedged. In fact, they keep pounding the wedge in further by enacting ever more draconian state abortion bans and talking up a national ban, and by nominating and electing ever more extreme candidates for office who have proven incapable of governing.

Democrats plan to drive the wedge deeper in 2024 by putting abortion initiatives on the ballots in several states, including some of the battlegrounds. The GOP will be on the defensive, but the Evangelical right wing of the party will insist upon continuing its extremist messaging. That is a huge mistake on their part. And it does not take much, usually just a single percentage point, to lose elections in the purple states these days.

The GOP is in disarray

There’s a lot of attention on Biden’s poll numbers, but for the GOP in the House and for MAGA extremists in general, those numbers are far worse. And to win the battleground states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada—the Republican party will need a serious ground game.

That’s not looking like it’s going to happen in some key states. The GOP has permitted extremists to gain control of the state party apparatuses in many of them, and they are far behind the Democrats in terms of organizing for 2024. In fact, some of these GOP state parties are nearly broke, and infighting is further hampering them badly. In Michigan, for example, at this time the party should have at least $10 million in its coffers for the fight ahead. At the end of September, it had just $35,000. That’s not just broke. That’s broken. In fact, two physical altercation broke out at GOP gatherings in the state this year, mirroring the threats and fighting happening among the GOP at the national level.

A similar story is playing out in Arizona, where the party has shelled out hundreds of thousands in legal expenses, and candidates like Kari Lake are still trying to undo their electoral defeat in 2022 in the courts. Like the Michigan GOP, the Arizona GOP appears nearly broke: In its August campaign financial disclosure it had less than $15,000 on hand. (The Democrats had nearly three quarters of a million by contrast.) Simply put, the once powerful GOP donor class has been reluctant to hand out funds to extremists in these state parties.

It turns out, MAGA extremists who want to burn it all down aren’t ideal fundraisers for the party. Who’d have thought?

The work ahead for Democrats

Even with all of these positive factors, Democrats still have a lot of work to do. Trump’s voter base is older, whiter and shrinking, so he will seek to expand his base of support to include disgruntled minority voters. So Democrats will need to organize to keep those voters loyal and voting for Biden.

Trump has a problem with suburban women, and Democrats will need to remain organized, pressing particularly on the issues of abortion and MAGA extremism so that these voters turn out in big numbers, as they did in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

Trump lost the youth vote badly in each election, and there’s no indication that that will change in 2024. Still, Democrats will need to mobilize high turnout once more. But if the Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio elections are any sign—and again, they are, because these are real voters, not poll responders—that is very doable. Abortion rights, climate change and gun safety are all winning issues for Democrats and losers for Republicans among this demographic.

There are wild cards, of course, in all of this. The Republican party could splinter over a Trump conviction. Third party bids could siphon votes. We’ve seen two wars in two years begin, and the world remains unstable. The critical test through all of this will be Democratic unity and a clear articulation of the stakes of the election, so that our core constituencies remain steadfast and loyal, while the Republican base erodes.

The good news is that we can and will unite Democrats around important questions of national policy: protection of democracy, abortion rights, climate change, aid for Ukraine, gun safety, investments in manufacturing and infrastructure, and support for unions and workers’ rights.

By contrast, the GOP is internally divided on many of these same issues and will have difficulty agreeing on any policy at all. That is why so many of them look to a single, highly deficient and dangerous man.

And that is what it ultimately might come down to: Joe Biden, who presents a clear, hopeful and solutions-based vision; or Donald Trump, who offers only grievance, fear and one-man rule. That is the contrast we will draw and together help amplify. It’s a winning message, and it’s why I believe we will win.

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