Trump and Biden’s Paths to Victory: Two Essays from Two Perspectives

Buckle up.

Image credit: Politico

This post has two parts. In the first essay, Contributor Alexander von Sternberg makes the case for Donald Trump’s victory. In the second essay, Jamie Paul makes the case for Biden.

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Why Trump Could Win in 2024

By Alexander von Sternberg

The case for how former President Donald Trump could win the 2024 election — which would be the first time a president has been elected for a second non-consecutive term since the 1893 re-election of Grover Cleveland — relies less on the man’s qualities as a leader and more on how much his opponent is disliked or distrusted. The scenario in 2024 could end up being an almost perfect repeat of what led to his victory in 2016 over Hillary Clinton. Despite outperforming Trump in the popular vote and in polls, Clinton couldn’t crack a 50 percent approval rating. President Biden’s current approval numbers don’t bode much better, resting at around 38 percent as of this writing, according to FiveThirtyEight. With that in mind, it’s not inconceivable that Trump could win this one, even with his looming court cases and possible convictions. Remember that the famous American socialist Eugene V. Debs was able to run for president from prison in 1920 and scoop up a million votes (nearly four percent of the vote).

As of late, the Democratic establishment has handed Trump a powerful weapon: victimization. Many in the anti-Trump crowd might hand-wave away the idea that Trump is being “persecuted”, as he claimed back in August 2023, since that word carries with it many implications we don’t typically associate with the American political process. But it’s hard to argue that removing Trump from election ballots in two states (so far) isn’t a form of political persecution. It absolutely is. Whether these developments are justifiable or deserved is the subject of much debate. What is undeniable, however, is that this will only make Trump stronger.

As irritating as Trump’s self-described victimhood is for a lot of people, the more the Democratic establishment goes after him in the legal realm, the more his support seems to grow, at least among his base, as reported by the Washington Post in October 2023. While some research seems to suggest that the charges being levied against him aren’t that helpful, the people banking on a second Biden victory should not get too comfortable with their certainty. If we return to the fact that the incumbent in this election isn’t even reaching 40 percent approval in an election year, it should be obvious that a Donald Trump victory is not outside of the realm of possibility.

None of even touches on why Biden is so low in popularity, which could continue to sink, and sink rapidly. Given the ravages of aging (especially with presidents), the now-81-year-old Joe Biden’s senescence is, as the Associated Press reported back in August 2023, “widely seen” as a problem with voters, including his own supporters. This is unlikely to change, let alone change in Biden’s favor, the more he falls down or gets confused mid-speech in the months to come. 

It’s also important to remember James Carville’s famous phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid!” While the most politically engaged Americans seem more moved by culture war nonsense than by the reliable “kitchen sink” issues, the electorate in general really only wants to know when gas prices or food costs are going down. While the inflation of 2023 didn’t result in a recession as many feared (though we still can’t rule it out), Trump can argue that Biden’s economic policies are what led to the price of eggs soaring to over seven dollars per dozen in places like California. How effective that messaging will be depends on how well things are going for the average voter and how well Biden can offer a counter-message, but given Americans’ general economic uneasiness, the economy could well be a factor in a Trump win.

Despite the on-paper economic numbers actually being optimistic, Americans have reason to be skeptical. As the economist Tyler Cowen explained on Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast, you can’t blame a culture that has gone through a global pandemic and a massive financial crisis within a 12-year period for being cynical. That kind of cynical anxiety has always been fodder for populist invocations, which are Trump’s stock and trade.

Finally, the fact that Trump hasn’t gone out of his way to position himself as the avatar of anti-“wokeness”, as Florida governor Ron DeSantis has, could end up being an asset for his campaign. By avoiding such a terminally online issue (and mocking DeSantis and company for saying “woke”), Trump is signaling something paradoxical: strength. He’s not saying that far-left culture warriors aren’t a problem; he’s essentially saying that he isn’t scared of them. If we consider the most material objections to “wokeness”, it has much less to do with postmodernism or “cultural Marxism” and more to do with putting otherwise innocent people on blast for being “problematic”, often costing them their jobs. Trump treating wokeness like a joke may actually be the best weapon a politician can wield against it. He’s already the most un-politically correct man who ever lived, so why bother wringing his hands over it?

Biden, for his part (to say nothing of the more progressive staffers in his administration), has staked out the most anti-woke position of our age — that is, supporting Israel in their war against Hamas. However, he also declared ahead of time that his Supreme Court pick would be a black woman, and hosted “the largest Pride Month celebration ever held at the White House” in 2023. It isn’t difficult to frame Biden as the “woke president.” While these kinds of issues are niche, they have the potential to serve as tie breakers, especially in non-coastal battleground states.

The truth is, there is no way to really predict who will win the election of 2024. But, given everything discussed, there’s a very good chance that Trump could make history with this election — whether that means becoming the historical heir to Grover Cleveland in victory, or running the most successful campaign for president from a jail cell since Eugene Debs.

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Why Biden Could Win in 2024

By Jamie Paul

President Joe Biden is far from the strongest candidate the Democrats could run in 2024 — by a long shot. Back in 2022, I wrote a piece gaming out scenarios (some realistic and others more amusing) by which the Dems could replace Biden and put themselves in a better position to win. That’s not the direction they went, and at this stage, it may be too late to change course unless health issues force their hand. As unusual a candidate as Joe Biden is — an 81-year-old with approval numbers in the toilet — these are highly unusual times. In any other time or place, Biden would be dead in the water; a crushing defeat waiting to happen. But right here, right now, he has a clear path to victory.

Biden’s first advantage is structural: he is an incumbent. Biden has the bully pulpit to get out his message and the ability to make headlines and stay in the news simply by doing his job — without having to vigorously campaign or spend boatloads of advertising cash. Biden is almost certainly incapable of burning the midnight oil on the campaign trail. He was granted a reprieve in 2020 due to the pandemic. In 2024, his incumbency will allow him to campaign mostly from the White House, with a roster of heavy-hitting surrogates, likely led by former President Barack Obama, holding rallies around the country in his stead.

Second, Biden has a surprisingly impressive list of accomplishments to run on. In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit reduced child poverty to 5.2 percent, the lowest rate on record. Biden signed into law the biggest infrastructure bill in US history, with bipartisan support. His executive order to forgive a portion of student loan debt, loudly derided though it was, is quietly supported by a majority of Americans. And Biden’s handling of both the Russo-Ukrainian war and the Israel-Hamas war have demonstrated strength and leadership on the world stage. The fact that both the far-left and -right detest his foreign policy is itself an endorsement of his prudence.

The economy in particular is an interesting situation. As per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, when Biden took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4 percent, and the labor force participation rate was 61.3 percent. As of December 2023, unemployment has shrunk to 3.7 percent, a near-record low, and the labor force participation rate has ticked up to 62.5 percent. When Biden took office, there were just about 7 million people who wanted a job, but didn’t have one. Today, that figure is 5.6 million. In addition, hundreds of billions of dollars have been pouring into the domestic manufacturing sector, which appears poised for a boom (something Trump promised but never delivered on). And yet, for all this, as Alex noted above, the public outlook on the economy remains pessimistic.

True, inflation spiked in mid-2022 at 9.1 percent, but it has continually fallen since then to 3.4 percent. And it’s also the case that any given economic improvement will take time (months or sometimes even years) to filter down to everyday people, and will, in any event, not necessarily be evenly distributed across every corner of society. Should these economic figures continue to improve over the course of 2024, however, or at the very least hold steady, then with every passing week and month their effects will reach larger and larger shares of the electorate. It stands to reason that with more time and a similar trajectory, public opinion will begin to warm on the economy, to Biden’s benefit. Biden’s numbers aren’t great at the moment, but the election isn’t being held today. The only time they matter is on November 5th. Whether this shift in attitudes will occur depends in part on the trends and forces in the economy, but also on the Biden campaign’s effectiveness at disseminating the message and articulating (read: bragging about) his accomplishments.

Speaking of braggadocio, Joe Biden has a secret weapon: Donald Trump. Biden has proven to be an easy leader to disapprove of, but difficult to truly hate as a human being. Trump, on the other hand, is widely regarded as a scoundrel and a boor even by his own supporters. The fact is, Trump mobilizes opposition votes like nothing else. He is the most self-sabotaging political figure in living memory.

It’s been surprisingly easy to forget about Trump. Once he was out of office, booted from Twitter, and no longer dominating the 24-hour news cycle, he became, for many Americans, like a quickly fading bad dream. When Trump becomes the official Republican nominee, however, and is back on everyone’s collective radar with 24/7 coverage, the public, including the tens of millions of voters who don’t pay much attention to politics, will be reminded of just how insane he is. What (and how many) crazy, unhinged, and alienating things will he say or do in the coming months? Such questions go beyond the wildest imaginings of even the most colorful satirists. Don’t underestimate how much of an advantage it is for Biden to know that he can sit back in his presidential basement and watch Trump run himself into the ground with his own mouth.

The 2024 cycle also seems primed to see the most third party activity since Ross Perot in the 1990s. And the Democrats, who, in recent years, have undemocratically gone on the warpath against third parties, stand to benefit. On the left, Jill Stein is running once again for the Green Party, and professor Cornel West is running as an independent. Together, they will almost certainly receive a mere pittance of votes, and disproportionately from people in noncompetitive states. As I covered in “Young Voters Are Furious at Biden. That’s Nice”, the most anti-establishment progressive voters are concentrated in safely blue states where their votes, if we’re being brutally honest, don’t really matter. They could vote for Trump, or stay home, or write their cat’s name on the ballot, and it won’t affect the outcome of the election. The rest of the third party field, on the other hand, is bad news for Trump.

In 2020, the Libertarian Party garnered 1.2 percent of the popular vote. In 2024, with two deeply unpopular candidates, this figure is very likely to rise, and most of this increase will be drawn from would-be Republican voters, not Dem voters. Similarly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running as an independent, and his campaign, with its populist messaging and anti-institutional, vaccine-skeptical conspiracism, will siphon far more votes from Trump than Biden. The wild card is Joe Manchin, the conservative Democratic Senator from West Virginia who has flirted both with leaving the party and a presidential run under the “No Labels” ticket. He hasn’t announced his candidacy. He may never. But if he does, I suspect his campaign will be a dud. He remains one of the country’s most unpopular senators — so much so, in fact, that he may not even win re-election in the Senate. What little support he does have is in his home state, a Republican stronghold that isn’t in play.

Does this mean Biden will sail toward an easy victory? Not at all. As things stand right now, 2024 appears to be a nail-biter in the making. But Biden has a far better chance to win this thing than he’s given credit for. When we look beyond the current approval numbers and cut through the noise, he’s got a clear path. 

See also: “Election of the Living Dead”

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