My apologies again for a hiatus. It’s been both a busy and challenging start to the semester at UNC and the writing habit is easier to fall out of than to stay locked into.
Over the next fourteen months, I expect I’ll be writing quite a bit about the 2024 presidential election. I know some folks are tired of hearing about the next election being the most important of our lifetimes, and there’s a natural tendency to exaggerate the urgency of whatever is most immediately in front of us, of course. But I do firmly believe that there is one unique and highly consequential fact about the 2024 presidential election. If Donald Trump wins the presidency, we simply have no guarantee that he would subsequently willingly cede the office. There’s much more to say about the potential consequences of a second Trump term, but that reality alone puts this next election into its own category.
With those stakes in mind, many of you will be following the polls and the unfolding campaign with perhaps a higher level of anxiety than has even been true these past few cycles. And I am *not* here to tell you that you can relax, that everything will be OK. I simply don’t know that to be the case.
But at least for today, I want to share some potentially hopeful data, with all the relevant caveats about how early it still is and how many unknowns that will be revealed in the next 420 days or so will factor into the outcome of the next presidential election, as well as all the other state and federal elections next year.
Last night, in a special election for the state House in New Hampshire, Democrat Hal Rafter won a GOP-held seat by twelve points. A grand total of 2800 people cast ballots in that election, so you can be forgiven for shrugging your shoulders. But in addition to pulling Democrats even in the state House, and potentially ending full GOP control of New Hampshire state government, the win continues what has been a below-the-radar banner 2023 for Democrats in special elections across the country. As Nathaniel Rakich detailed for 538 this morning, in about thirty special elections so far this year, to fill both state legislative and Congressional seats, Democrats have outperformed their expected vote totals, on average, by a hefty eleven points.
As Rakich points out, those data cannot predict precisely what is going to happen in legislative races next year. However, over the past three decades, the results of special elections in the two years prior to Congressional election years have been a pretty good guide to how a party is likely to perform. Thus, Democrats’ very good showing in special elections, combined with a redrawing of some gerrymandered maps, may put Democrats in a pretty strong position to retake the House in 2025.
And while that doesn’t speak directly to how we might view the 2024 presidential race at this point, it does add to a picture in which Democrats on the ground appear to be outperforming polling since 2022. Other elections this year, including the August ballot initiative in Ohio, in which the pro-abortion side won a resounding victory, also point in a similar direction.
All of this is really by way of a caveat about the series of polls in recent months showing a virtual dead heat between President Biden and Donald Trump in a presumptive 2024 rematch. As my friend JH and I were discussing this morning, the enthusiasm gap between Biden and Trump is enormous. Very few people profess to be excited by Joe Biden and large numbers of voters, including many Democrats, continue to tell pollsters that he’s too old, they wish someone else would run, etc. Trump, meanwhile, excites his base so much that, with few exceptions, the candidates currently running for the GOP nomination, in what has to be an unprecedented state of affairs, are afraid to say a bad word about the guy they’re presumably running against.
That enthusiasm gap is certainly showing up in the polling. But it may matter less next year than one would normally expect. This is so for a few reasons, one of which is that in this era of negative partisanship, people’s dislikes motivate their votes more than their likes do. And Trump is, among other things, deeply disliked by a large proportion of the electorate. Add to that what may be the post-Roe factor at work — one possible explanation for Democrats’ over-performance in recent months — and the picture that emerges is that the head-to-head polling tells us less than it might normally (and at this early date, it can’t tell us a whole lot anyway).
To be clear, one must assume we’re in for an unnervingly close race next year. And unforeseen circumstances, like a possible economic downturn, an unexpected health event or any number of other developments could shift the picture decisively in one direction or another.
But while in purely partisan political terms the headlines aren’t so hot lately for Democrats, voters may be telling us a somewhat different story.
I can't believe you are going down that road. Do you imagine any Trump supporter would support changing the presidency to a monarchy? Where is your faith in your fellow man? Do you believe the military would support Trump, that the Senate and the House would roll over? He would be so dead. The Floyd riots were allowed to happen and so was January 6. The powers that be and their faithful media are playing us.