Biden And Trump Tacitly Agree About 2024
They see the election the same way, and both think they can win—but only one of them can
The past week has left me with the obviously insensible impression that, from both Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s perspective, everything is going according to plan.
Not everything everything. Both men would obviously love to be popular and cruising to election with majority support; instead both men are broadly disliked.
But within that constraint, the candidates have their own theories of victory, both of which seem credible, and are now falling into place simultaneously.
The Biden campaign’s theory of victory was vindicated last week by this Marist poll out of New Hampshire. It shows Biden with a fairly grim 38 percent approval rating. It also shows him beating Donald Trump 52-45—almost exactly the margin of victory by which he won the state in 2020.
Biden’s campaign has banked everything on this “lesser of two evils” view of the electorate: When Trump becomes the de facto GOP nominee, perhaps as early as Tuesday night, when it’s finally a binary choice between Trump and Biden, people will remember Trump’s vileness and the chaos of his presidency, and choose Biden. He and Trump are both unpopular—in some polls, Biden’s actually less popular than Trump—but many of Biden’s detractors are soft disapprovers. People who think Biden’s too old, or ineffective, or uninspiring or…whatever. They wish someone else were president or that Democrats would nominate a successor, but they’re not #NeverBiden. Trump’s detractors, by contrast, nearly all despise him. And they comprise a majority of the country.
I’ve been obsessed with this phenomenon, the intensity of Trump hatred, ever since Trump won the presidency in 2016—it suggests that anti-Trumpism is the most powerful force in American politics, and, if husbanded well, an insurmountable obstacle to his hold on power. It’s a big part of why I get frustrated when Democrats try to center politics around other, less potent things.
For now, though, reconsolidating the anti-Trump opposition remains a viable strategy for Biden in 2024. At least in New Hampshire.
The most striking thing about the Trump strategy—a sign that there are still people in his orbit who don’t buy his bullshit—is that they accept the premise of Biden’s theory of the electorate: In an untainted popularity contest between the two men, Biden wins. More people will choose bland liberalism over rotten fascism.
But not that many more!
Trump’s theory of victory is that he can fracture the center-left coalition enough, and consolidate the center-right wing coalition just enough, to taint the head-to-head. To some extent there’s nothing remarkable about this at all—consolidating the base and dividing the opposition is textbook campaigning. Rooting an entire campaign in subterfuge and intimidation on the other hand is a Trump innovation. Unbound by ethical constraints, he’s executing that strategy pretty well.