Trump Will Defeat Biden For Sure

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Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 Republican primary is not certain. But it now looks more than likely.

The former president boasts more than twice as much support as Ron DeSantis, who leads the Florida governor by a 51-to-24 percent margin in the FiveThirtyEights average of GOP primary polls. No other candidate polled more than 6 percent. And the gap between Trump and DeSantis has continued to grow wider for weeks.

Indeed, the Sunshine State’s Viktor Orbn seems to be wilting under the heat of the national spotlight. DeSantis shows better on paper than on television. He was able to push a thoroughly Trumpist agenda and then win a landslide reelection in a purple state. And he also served as the national standard-bearer of conservative COVID doves throughout the pandemic. But the small acts of constituent service that earned DeSantis bipartisan approval in Florida such as restoring wetlands and raises for public school teachers haven’t really translated to the national stage. And they certainly aren’t winning cards in a Republican primary. Meanwhile, DeSantiss’ notable opposition to the vaccine and mask mandates is decreasing with each passing day.

Put aside all the reasons why DeSantis is theoretically an attractive candidate and you’re left with all the reasons why he isn’t in reality. Charles is the man. He doesn’t like people, and it shows. His antipathy to schmoozing and glad-handing is so strong that he can’t be trusted to take calls from billionaire GOP megadonors. He eats pudding with his fingers. Trump, an oppressive bully, has no problem identifying his competitors’ sore points and crushing them mercilessly. This week, the Republican front-runner suggested DeSantis may soon be forced to seek an emergency personality transplant.

We are more than a year away from the Republican convention. And in the meantime, Trump is liable to face multiple criminal charges in addition to a civil trial in which he is accused of rape. So it’s entirely possible that DeSantis, or one of the party’s current long shots, will ultimately prevail. But it seems very likely that Trump will continue his place at the top of the GOP ticket.

With President Biden officially announcing his re-election bid this week, he’s on track for a re-election bid in 2020.

This led some Republican operatives to resign themselves to Biden’s re-election. As Jonathan Martin reports for Politico, Trumps intraparty skeptics are already trying to find silver linings in his inevitable defeat:

It took Democrats three consecutive defeats in the 1980s for the Democratic Leadership Council to finally gain traction and lift one of their own in 1992.

Republicans need only suffer two White House defeats to finally get rid of Trump and, in the meantime, have the Supreme Court majority he helped deliver as a political backstop.

As an astute Republican strategist, and no NeverTrumper, it was put to me recently: Just need to go to the basement, ride the tornado and come back when it’s over to rebuild the neighborhood.

This Republican, like some like him, was hoping for a strong Trump alternative to emerge but became more pessimistic, DeSantis stumbled early confirming his doubts about the Florida governor. On top of that, there’s the matter of Roe’s overturning and the political stalemate the party has between its staunch anti-abortion activists and a broader electorate that supports legal abortion. Is the dog that caught Trump’s car and abortion.

I wish the fatalism of these strategists was well founded. But I really don’t think so.

Without question, Trump is a very weak candidate in the general election. In no small measure, his personal abhorrence makes much of the Democratic Party advocating-and-mobilizing for it. For a large number of swing-state suburbanites, the Trumps’ presence on the GOP ticket is reason enough to support the Democrat. This fact is reflected not only in 2020 voting patterns but also in the poor performance of Trump-y candidates in swing states last year. Meanwhile, Trump has done more in 2018 and 2020 to increase turnout in the Democratic base than countless get-out-the-vote initiatives. His nomination would make it easier to reassemble the Biden coalition than the ascension of Nikki Haley or Tim Scott.

But that doesn’t mean Trump’s coronation will ensure Biden’s re-election. On the contrary, there is reason to believe that Trump’s chances of winning in 2024 will be as good as his chances in 2020, when he reached the 45,000-plus vote margin.

It’s easy to overlook how narrowly Trump lost his battle with Biden. The Democrat won the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points and got 36 more Electoral College votes than the 270 required. But his margins in pivotal swing states are slim. In the tipping-point state of Wisconsin, only 20,682 votes separated Biden from Trump. If Biden had won the popular vote by just 4 points, Trump would have likely won re-election.

It is possible that the Electoral College is less biased against Democrats today than it was in 2020. Overturning Roe v. Wade seemed to remind some secular white voters in the Midwest why they used to oppose the party of Bible thumpers. In 2022, Democrats did better in key races in Michigan and Pennsylvania than they did nationwide. But, as a general rule, the most recent presidential election is a better guide to the geographic distribution of party support than the most recent midterms. So, a reasonable default assumption is that if Biden wins the popular vote by just 3 points next year, he will lose re-election.

And Biden is less popular today than he was on Election Day in 2020. His approval rating currently sits at around 43 percent. As political scientist Ruy Texiera notes, the previous three incumbent presidents received only one to 2 percent more support in the popular vote than in approval polls. Currently, in surveys of a hypothetical 2020 election rematch, Biden leads Trump by an average of just 1.4 percentage points. In 2016, a 2-point popular-vote win wasn’t enough to get Hillary Clinton an Electoral College majority.

What’s more, there’s reason to fear that the Bidens’ economic record will get worse before it gets better. He has presided over the highest inflation in half a century, and voters widely disapprove of his economic management. In the long run, the strong case for Biden is that prices will stabilize by 2024 and he can finally enjoy the political benefits of full employment. But as the Fed’s interest rate hikes increase the economy, the likelihood of an election-year economic downturn continues to rise. Judging by the spread between three-month and ten-year US Treasury rates, markets believe there is about a 58 percent chance the US will enter a recession by March 2024. Thursday’s lower-than-expected GDP numbers lend credence to that forecast.

It’s possible that a mild recession would kill inflation, thereby eliminating what has become Biden’s biggest economic liability. But even if the pace of inflation has slowed, the level of many notable prices will remain markedly higher than they were under Trump. Combine discontent about higher grocery bills with rising unemployment and odds are the Bidens will enjoy the same election-year rebound that has seen many former incumbents decline.

Bidens other liabilities in his advanced age will of course become clearer between now and November 2024. Bidens status as an 80-year-old is less of a liability against a 76-year-old Trump than a 44-year-old DeSantis. But the president looks older than his makeup-and-tanner-drenched rival.

Finally, although Trump has many demerits as a general election candidate, he has no unique strengths. The mogul is less wedded to the conservative movement’s ideological project than many of his rivals. Unlike DeSantis, Trump has never endorsed the privatization of Social Security. And, to this point, he has been less amenable to the anti-abortion movements maximalist demands than the Florida governor. Last week, the Trump campaign released word that the candidate considered a national abortion ban a vote loser and was unlikely to support one. The less competitive DeSantis becomes, the more likely Trump will avoid moving any further rights on abortion policy.

All in all, Biden is lucky that the Republican Party is unlikely to help renominate a proven loser. But he was not so lucky.

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