The Weekly Sift

If Biden and Trump face off again in 2024, Biden will win again.

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Democrats, at least in recent years, tend to be pessimists.

Some of us were probably born with a pessimistic nature, while others were scarred by 2016. That year, even hours after all the votes had been cast, it still seemed impossible that Donald Trump could become president. The polls had said said so, though not as convincingly as many of us remember. (The Real Clear Politics final polling average had Clinton ahead by 3.2%, and she won the popular vote by 2.1%. The too-late-to-poll news had broken badly that final weekend — the second James Comey email scare — and the votes still had to fall almost perfectly for Trump to pull off an Electoral College victory.)

But independent of any data-driven expectations, how could it have happened? How could Mr. Grab-em-by-the-Pussy have beaten one of the best-qualified candidates ever?

In every election since, I’ve had to talk my friends and readers off the ledge. 2018 was a blue-wave election, but we watched the returns come in with tension. In 2020, no poll could be comforting enough. Hillary had led in the polls, and look what happened to her.

Even in early August of 2020, the what-if-Trump-refuses-to-leave worries were so widespread that I had to address them, in a post that I think holds up very well to hindsight.

Here’s something I have great faith in: If the joint session of Congress on January 6 recognizes that Joe Biden has received the majority of electoral votes, he will become president at noon on January 20 and the government will obey his orders. Where Donald Trump is at the time, and whatever he is claiming or tweeting, will be of no consequence.

If Trump’s tweets bring a bunch of right-wing militiamen into the streets with their AR-15s, they can cause a lot of bloodshed, but they can’t keep Trump in office. They are no match for the Army, whose Commander-in-Chief will be Joe Biden.

So if Trump wants to stay on as president, he has to screw the process up sooner; by January 6, it’s all in the bag, and probably it’s all in the bag by December 14. Even stretching out the process with legal proceedings won’t help him: The Constitution specifies that his term ends on January 20. If at that time there is no new president or vice president to take over, the job devolves to the Speaker of the House, who I believe will be Nancy Pelosi.

Even so, Democrats watched Trump’s post-election machinations with worry. No matter how ridiculous his lawsuits were, what about the Supreme Court? Why wouldn’t his court appointees just declare him president?

In 2022, we all trembled before the Great Red Wave that never materialized. Nearly all the MAGA extremists went down to defeat.

And still, the ghost of 2016 haunts us.

It shouldn’t. There are a bunch of reasons to be optimistic about 2024, beginning with 2020.

Biden beat Trump in 2020. It really wasn’t that close. The fact that it took so long to count the votes created the impression that the 2020 election was much closer than it actually was.

In the popular vote, it wasn’t close at all: Biden won by more than 7 million votes, or 4.5%. Compare that to 2012, when Obama beat Romney by just under 5 million votes, or 3.9%.

In the Electoral College, Biden won 306-232, which is sort of close, but not historically close. In 1976, Carter beat Ford 297-240, and that has never been considered a photo-finish. It’s nothing like 2000, when Bush beat Gore 271-266 and carried Florida by a mere 537 votes (according to the official count).

The only way that 2020 seems close is if you imagine Trump able to target votes in precisely the states where he needs them. Unlike 2000, one state wouldn’t do. The path to a 2020 Trump victory would mean “finding” him not just the 11,780 votes he needed in Georgia, but also 10,458 in Arizona and 20,683 in Wisconsin.

My point isn’t that those are unassailable margins, but that they are clear margins. It’s not a rounding error that depended on some small pile of ballots with hanging chads. To be elected, Trump didn’t just need to get the breaks. He got the breaks; a 7-million-vote margin should imply an Electoral College landslide. In order to win in 2024, Trump has to get more votes.

And that’s what the rest of my argument focuses on: Not the continued allegiance of the MAGA faithful, but the opinions of the people who picked Biden over Trump in 2024. What has happened in the last four years that would change their minds? It looks to me like all the tides are running in the other direction. [1]

Demographics continue to work in Biden’s favor. The 2020 results were strongly skewed by age: 50-and-older voters favored Trump 52%-47%, while 18-24-year-olds voted for Biden 65%-31%.

Not to be morbid (I’m 66 myself), but a non-negligible number of over-50 voters die in the course of four years, and are replaced in the electorate by people who were 14-17 in 2020. That matters. And Republicans have their usual plan to solve the problem of voting blocs that oppose them: take away their right to vote. That’s why Vivak Ramaswamy wants to raise the voting age to 25. [A quick aside: If you couple this proposal with a GOP no-exceptions abortion ban, in a few cycles there will be kids in junior high whose moms aren’t old enough to vote.]

A lot has been written about young voters and their distrust of politics-as-usual. Yes, they tend to be skeptical of both major parties and less willing than past generations to incorporate a political label into their identities. Even if they voted or rooted for Biden (or against Trump) in 2020, they’re not going to be swayed by Democratic Party loyalty in 2024. So their votes can’t be taken for granted.

All the same, they will get to election day and see two candidates. Both will seem unimaginably old. (The difference between a 78-year-old and an 81-year-old is meaningless when you’re in your 20s, and Biden is noticeably more spry than Trump. Trump also has much more of an old-man speaking style, focusing on past grievances and demanding credit for what he deems are his past successes rather than talking about the future.) But when it comes to the issues they care about, they will see a strong contrast between those men.

• Biden has not done enough to stem climate change. But he has at least done something, while Trump still denies the problem exists and wants to roll back the progress Biden has made.
• Biden wants to protect reproductive rights, while Trump’s Supreme Court has taken them away, and Trump’s party wants to finish the job.
• Biden hasn’t had enough support in Congress to do much to stop gun violence and prevent school shootings, but Trump denies the problem.
• Biden is anti-racist, while Trump is racist. (Trump and his supporters claim otherwise, but they’re not fooling anyone.) Gen Z is a minority-majority generation.
• Biden wants to protect LGBTQ people, while Trump targets them. Even if they are not LGBTQ themselves, literally everyone in Gen Z has LGBTQ friends. Few see those friends as immoral or believe in a God who rejects them.

Granted, there are young fascists who are inspired by Trump’s authoritarian vision. But go back to my main theme: Has Trump done anything to change the minds of the majority who opposed him in 2020? When you put yourself in the place of a typical 20-something, the answer is clearly no.

Swing states have trended blue and anti-MAGA since 2020. In Arizona, the Republican Party went all-in for MAGA candidates, and got swept in all the statewide races. In Georgia, a MAGA candidate lost a Senate race, while the Trump-resisting Republicans (Brian Kemp, Brad Raffensperger) won the state offices. In Wisconsin this April, a liberal judge won the race for a seat on the state supreme court with a 10% margin. Those are the Biden states Trump needs to flip.

Looking at other flip-from-Biden-to-Trump possibilities, the situation is even less promising: Democrats won unified control of the government in Michigan. In Pennsylvania, a Democrat whose stroke prevented him from campaigning much won a 5% victory over a MAGA Republican in the Senate race, while a Democrat beat a MAGA Republican for governor by 15%.

The issues favor Biden. Abortion has been a huge issue for Democrats since the Dobbs decision last year, and figures to be huge again in 2024. The reason the Dobbs decision happened at all is that Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices, so there’s no way for him to wriggle out of that responsibility.

I could be wrong about this, but I believe this summer’s disaster-filled weather will mark an inflection point in the climate-change debate. I don’t think climate change will be an issue Trump can ignore in 2024, and I don’t think denial is a viable position any more. LaHaina burned to the ground. Smoke blotted out the New York City skyline. A tropical storm hit Los Angeles. Climate change isn’t theoretical any more; voters can see it happening with their own eyes.

In foreign policy, Trump vs Biden is a proxy for Putin vs Zelenskyy. I’ll take Zelenskyy.

What’s been holding Biden back in the polls is that his excellent economic record hasn’t registered yet with the public. But give it another year.

Biden has a better story to tell. One of the few criticisms the other Republican presidential candidates have been willing to launch against Trump is that he didn’t get much done. He didn’t build his wall, and Mexico didn’t pay for what little progress he made. He didn’t pass a plan to rebuild American infrastructure. He didn’t get US troops out of Afghanistan. He didn’t shrink the trade deficit.

What he did manage to do was cut rich people’s taxes while refusing to show us his own tax returns. He increased the deficit every year, from the $0.59 trillion deficit of FY 2016 to the record $3.13 trillion of FY 2020.

Biden has made good on many of his priorities, and along the way has done some of the things Trump promised to do, but couldn’t get done. Biden passed an infrastructure package. Withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan was an ugly process, but he got it done. He reinvested in American manufacturing. The Inflation Reduction Act is helping shift our economy away from the dying industries of the past and towards the growing industries of the future.

And it’s working. Reversing a decades-long trend, wage growth has been strongest for low-income workers. Inequality is shrinking.

Trump still represents the old Republican trickle-down economics. Biden’s vision to build the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up” is both better economics and better politics.

On election day in 2020, Trump hadn’t tried to overthrow democracy yet. While the majority of Republicans seems to have accepted Trump’s version of January 6 as either a patriotic exercise or an enthusiastic crowd that spontaneously got out of hand, a significant number of them were rightfully horrified that Trump would launch such an attack on his own country.

From his 2016 candidacy all the way through 2020, people who had happily supported Romney and McCain told themselves that Trump really wasn’t that bad. Even after he started pushing the Big Lie, they thought he just needed time to accept the reality of his defeat. On November 9, 2020, the WaPo reported this:

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” said one senior Republican official. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”

Such “senior Republican officials” found out they were wrong. He was plotting to prevent Biden from taking power. He really was that bad. I have to wonder what that guy thinks about Trump now.

It’s hard to say just how many Republicans and Republican-leaning independents will reject Trump’s 2024 candidacy on those grounds. Even if they don’t cross over and vote for Biden, maybe they’ll just stay home. Maybe it won’t be that many, but remember: He needs to gain votes, not lose them.

Trump’s trials will take a toll. It is undeniably amazing that Trump’s support in the Republican Party has remained so solid, even after evidence of his criminality has been widely available. (As I explained two weeks ago, Trump has not seriously challenged the evidence in any of his four indictments. If it weren’t for threats, insults, and ad hominem attacks, he’d have nothing to say.)

But even among Republicans, the number who say he has “done nothing wrong” is dropping, and the number who believe he has committed a crime is growing.

Until recently, it was possible for Republicans to stick their heads in the sand and insist Trump’s legal problems were all politics. After all, they knew that their Benghazi hearings had been political BS, and their Hunter Biden hearings were going to be BS as well, so why shouldn’t they assume Democrats were doing the same thing?

So they didn’t watch the January 6 hearings, and didn’t notice that the witnesses against Trump were nearly all Republicans and officials from his own administration. They haven’t read the indictments, so they don’t appreciate the depth of the evidence against him.

The trials — at least some of which are bound to start before the election — will be harder to ignore. And guilty verdicts reached by juries of ordinary people will be harder yet. When people like Mike Pence and Brad Raffensperger are called to testify against Trump, or his fellow defendants start to flip against him, the cognitive dissonance will be intense.

As the trials get underway, even the MAGA faithful will be shaken by Trump’s sheer impotence. Even judges he appointed won’t buy his legal arguments. He won’t dare take the stand in his own defense. All his claims that “the American people won’t stand for this” will be proven wrong. And he will suffer a long series of small indignities that he will be helpless to prevent. (When he surrenders in Georgia later this week, for example, we may find out his actual height and weight — which I suspect are nothing like the figures he’s been claiming.) He won’t even slightly resemble the godlike figure his cult imagines.

Some Republicans will never admit they were wrong about Trump, but many will reach a point where they just don’t want to think about him any more. By election day, Republican turnout may lag. And again, we’re talking about him losing votes. Where is he going to gain votes? Among the people who didn’t vote for Trump in 2020, how many are seeing the evidence against him and thinking “That’s who I want as my president”?

But what about the polls? The current RCP polling average has Biden up by a miniscule 0.4%, and two recent polls that are part of that average say the race is tied. Biden’s approval rating is 13 points underwater.

How can I not be worried about that?

Well, let’s start with the fact that Trump’s approval is 17 points underwater. Also recall that this point in 2011 marked a low in President Obama’s popularity. His approval rating was 12 points negative that September, but he went on to a 332-206 Electoral College victory the next year.

Political pundits tend to underestimate how many low-information and low-attention voters we have in the US. The political class may be obsessed with Trump and Biden, but tens of millions of Americans have not even thought about their 2024 vote yet. Millions of women have not processed yet that a vote for Trump will surrender their reproductive rights for good. Millions of young people have not understood yet that reelecting Trump will doom their future to climate change.

A few of them never will think things through like that. But the ones who do will provide a sizeable margin for Biden.

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[1] A worthy question is: What happens if the Republicans somehow don’t nominate Trump? Well, if you imagine them nominating an actual moderate, the kind of Republican who can win a blue-state governorship like Maryland’s Larry Hogan or New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu, then Biden is probably in trouble. But I think I can pretty much guarantee that’s not going to happen.

A Ron DeSantis or Tim Scott will have the same issue problems as Trump: What about abortion? What about climate change? What about gay rights? Isn’t your economic plan just to keep cutting rich people’s taxes and giving corporations more freedom to poison us?

But any non-Trump Republican has an even bigger problem: What happened to Trump? Did he magically disappear? Did he accept his primary defeat gracefully and endorse the victor?

Again, that’s not going to happen. If Trump isn’t the nominee, most likely he has stomped away mad and is accusing the candidate who defeated him of fraud. I don’t think the GOP can win in that scenario.