Fifteen months from (potential) Doomsday

A dead heat

Horrifyingly, we're just fifteen months away from the next presidential election. I won't spend all of the next fifteen months talking about the horse race, but I thought I'd weigh in on the big new polls The New York Times and Siena College reported out yesterday and today.

In the data released yesterday, to no one's surprise, Donald Trump held a commanding lead over his GOP "challengers,"¹ about forty points ahead of his nearest competitor, Ron De Santis, and miles in front of everyone else. At this point, it's hard to imagine a scenario in which Trump is not the Republican nominee. 

On the Democratic side, as the Times reports today, President Biden has shored up his base of support among Democratic voters compared to a year ago, though a substantial number still wish someone else were the nominee. That was always a pipe dream. Barring a significant health event, Biden was always going to be the nominee. Likewise, there is essentially zero chance that someone other than Kamala Harris will join Biden on the Democratic ticket next year. 

Therefore, and barring the unforeseen, we can expect a Trump-Biden rematch in 2024. And the Times says it's essentially a dead heat, with its poll's top line numbers showing each candidate garnering 43% support among the registered voters sampled.

Nate Cohn, the Times' polling guru explained further that even after prompting those who say they're undecided, including those who appear to follow politics to some degree, little changes in the bottom line. The race is tied. 

Indeed, 43-43 reflects pretty well what a basic structural perspective of the electorate would guess. That is, each candidate can pretty confidently assume that that's their floor.² The vast majority of the electorate are clear partisans, in deed, if not in name, animated as much or more by how much they dislike the other party than how positively they feel about their own. That state of affairs reflects the era of “negative partisanship” we’re now living in and has produced presidential elections that are increasingly closely contested. The last major party presidential nominee who received less than 43% of the national vote was Walter Mondale, in 1984 (excluding 1992 and 1996, when Ross Perot won a significant chunk of votes as a third party candidate). 

And in recent elections, the results have only been tightening. Reagan’s 1984 victory was the last time a candidate won by a margin of ten percentage points or more. Obama’s seven point victory over John McCain in 2008 is a blowout by contemporary standards.

From here on out, the fight will be, more or less, over where the remaining 14% ultimately end up.

On that note, I had a conversation recently with a very smart individual who has previously run for national political office. This person emphasized that, in order to reach those infrequent, less engaged and/or more conflicted voters, it’s critical for Democrats to articulate a clear, positive vision for America, and not just focus on demonizing Trump. This line of thinking is one side of a longstanding debate about what kinds of messaging will most resonate with voters. On the other side of that debate are folks like the political analyst Rachel Bitecofer. Bitecofer argues that two things matter most in good campaign messaging - fear and stakes. That is, you have to convince voters both that the other "guy" is more dangerous than your candidate and that whether or not he or she wins is of clear and significant consequence to the lives of voters you're trying to win over. And that approach is consistent with the negative-partisanship frame.

For the vast majority of people who will end up voting, they already know the answers to those questions. For most Republicans, whatever Trump's misdeeds (and if they watch FOX News or other rightwing news sources, there's a good chance they think those are mostly up anyway), they don't compare to the grave threat that the liberal Biden agenda poses to America. We'll leave aside for now how frustrating that is. It's the reality of the situation. Likewise, for most Democrats, Trump is a monster, indeed a caricature of a monster. Worse, the prospect of his re-election and what it would mean for the country's institutions, our future, etc. is simply horrifying to contemplate.

But back to those voters who are still up for grabs, I think Bitecofer's perspective has substantial merit. To reach such voters requires getting through to them what is at stake in a decision to vote for one candidate over another, or whether to vote at all and that often means what harm a candidate can do to them or people they care about it. The overturning of Roe v. Wade provides a good illustration of how to think about stakes. Democrats have been messaging for decades about the threat of Republicans taking away women's right to choose. But it's one thing to consider that in one's calculus when, ultimately, it's an abstraction. We may wish it weren't so, but until Roe was overturned, the consequences of that occurrence was, in a basic sense, hypothetical. That's no longer the case. The actual horrors of what has unfolded since the Dobbs decision — indeed in many ways worse than even the most dire warnings —have made the stakes clear to a typical voter in a way that hypotheticals could not.

And that development may help explain why, despite middling polling numbers, Democrats have generally over-performed in both national and state level elections since the summer of 2022. Abortion isn’t the only issue that will move fence-sitting voters in 2024. But it’s a concrete example of what is required to convince voters that election outcomes matter and to clarify what is at stake in those outcomes.

Though I think the fear-and-stakes framework is largely correct, it’s not a guide for how to reach every potential gettable voter. More people say they dislike negativity in politics than their behavior reveals. However, some really do want to hear a positive message and vision and they want to know that a candidate is fighting for “people like me,” as my interlocutor put it to me. Under Biden, Democrats have leaned to a significant degree on an idea that has gained lots of traction in recent years in Democratic circles - that the best way to win over voters is to show, not tell. In other words, pass legislation that has a concrete, positive impact on people’s lives. In this conception of messaging, a picture (or enacted policy) is worth a thousand words. Biden and his team hope they've done that by some of the impressive legislation they passed last year, including the so-called Inflation Reduction Act which, among other things, appears to be providing substantial investment ballast to the economy (along with other legislation passed in 2021-22), creating a substantial number of good new jobs and redirecting energy markets more quickly and significantly than even the optimists had hoped. 

As it happens, I think an indirect effect of the IRA may prove to be its most electorally significant. That is, if the IRA and the spike in investment it has produced make a so-called soft economic landing more likely, thus forestalling a recession, that will greatly improve Biden's chances next year. But the show-don't-tell theory of political persuasion presumes that ordinary voters are able to connect the dots between parties, policies, people's lives and the character of the person trying to win their vote. And I think that is largely wishful thinking. That's where a well articulated vision, in broad strokes, focused on ideas like opportunity, tethered to meaningful policies to enhance opportunity (like, say, free or highly affordable college) become necessary. The policies themselves will not become animate even for people broadly sympathetic to them unless they can translate those into terms that make sense to people. In other words, most people can’t be counted on to connect the dots between policies and their lives without some help. A political vision that connects those dots, repeated consistently and clearly, is necessary to do that.

So, what does this tell us about 2024? Only so much, I am afraid. It is very likely that the election will again be close. It is a near certainty that the outcome will be decided in the electoral college by a small handful of states - Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, the six closest Biden wins in 2020. North Carolina was only decided by 1.4 percentage points in 2020, but I'm not holding my breath for a better outcome in 2024. And though Florida has been close in recent elections, we can forget about that for the foreseeable future. Biden doesn't have to win all six of the closest states he won in 2020, and there's reason to feel pretty good about Michigan and Pennsylvania.  Biden doesn’t need to win all of them, but h needs to win some combination of the four nail-biter states he won in 2020 - Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.

Other factors will matter as well. If the country slips into recession in the coming months, that will hurt Biden's chances. If the economy - by which I mean the most widely reported data, including unemployment, inflation and economic growth - continues to perform well, that will help him. Global developments, including some meaningful escalation in Ukraine, could also influence some sliver of the electorate. And while we can sketch broad patterns of voting habits and tendencies, humans are. fickle, and not everyone's behavior, lord knows, is predictable. There’s inescapable uncertainty in any closely competitive political environment.

If there's one thing I wish the Biden team would be doing more of already, it would be push out a clear and relentless messaging strategy.³ I think they've decided to let Trump stew in his own legal juices for now. And in terms of commenting on the specifics of his legal entanglements, I don't have a quarrel with Biden steering clear of that. But too much of the discursive terrain is being dominated by Republicans and their hobby horses, whether it's the "Biden crime family," their attack on trans folks, especially kids, or their relentless bleating about how Biden is a shill for a liberal-Marxist, America-hating agenda. It's time for the Biden team to join the discursive fight more fully, to help people connect the dots between policy and vision, and to remind them, over and over and over again, that the other party's only real economic agenda is to make life easier for the already well off, and worse for everyone else.

In the meantime, you can find me wringing my hands, rocking back and forth and otherwise trying to manage the anxiety of what lies ahead.

1. I put challengers in quotes because, other than Chris Christie, not a single one of them appears to want to take on Trump directly at all.

2. This only means so much, but there’s reason to believe 43% is closer to Trump’s ceiling than it is Biden’s.

3. There are plenty of political scientists who think messaging is overrated and even that campaigns themselves don’t really matter, since macro-level circumstances on the one hand, and people’s identities and gut-level preferences, on the other, ultimately determine election outcomes. My assumption is that, in close races, everything matters, at least a little bit. Including messaging.