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Where, exactly, are we in the election cycle right now?
In most election years, figuring this out is fairly easy, but in 2024, it’s not so simple. When Donald Trump locked up the Republican nomination in March, reporters declared that the general election had begun. But what’s going on is not yet a midsummer campaign, nor does it feel like one. President Joe Biden has started stumping more aggressively and giving more interviews, but he’s also been consumed by domestic and foreign crises. Trump’s time is consumed by a different kind of domestic crisis: He spends most days in a Manhattan courtroom defending against claims that he broke the law in covering up a sexual liaison. When he’s not in court, however, his rallies have been infrequent.
Political polling offers some sense of where things stand. Experts warn against reading too much into polls at this stage, and the industry is deeply flawed, but polls are nevertheless the best tool available for assessing voters’ attitudes. They have for months now suggested a small but consistent lead for Trump, with Biden closing the gap somewhat. A survey Monday from The New York Times and Siena College, typically one of the accurate polls, finds Trump leading Biden in five key swing states.
Predicting elections at this point is a game for fools, charlatans, and political strategists (though I repeat myself). But we can identify the biggest questions and dynamics that are shaping the race now and pointing toward how it might look in November.
1. Does Biden Fall?
Not metaphorically—literally. Voters have consistently expressed concern that both presidential candidates are too old, but the sentiment is especially strong in the case of Biden, the older of the two men. Though little evidence suggests mental slippage on the part of the president, his stiff gait and physical stumbles have created jitters. His commanding State of the Union address helped quiet discussion, but a serious fall or other ailment would thrust the matter back into the center, with potentially devastating results. Trump, it’s worth noting, faces some of the same risks. He’s also very old, and his naps during his trial have drawn scrutiny.
2. Trump’s High Floor and Low Ceiling
In the 2016 election, Donald Trump won 46.1 percent of the popular vote. As president, his Gallup approval rating hovered around 40, occasionally peaking as high as 49 but typically sitting lower. During the 2020 election, he polled mostly in the low 40s and won 46.8 percent of the popular vote. This cycle, polls place him (wait for it) in the mid-40s. As of this writing, the RealClearPolitics average has him at 46.1 percent, perfectly matching his 2016 result, to Biden’s 44.9. What years of experience of Trump have shown is that nothing he does can lose him the support of his base—roughly 40 percent of the electorate—and nothing he does can win him the approval of more than about 49 percent. His fate, and thus that of the election, is written in those nine percentage points: How much can he push the number up, and how much can Biden eat into it?
3. Whither, or Wither, the Economy?
Another thing that seems set in stone: Voters simply aren’t going to decide that they love “Bidenomics,” no matter how good the economic numbers look. (My colleague Rogé Karma has a good discussion of why.) A majority also trust Republicans more on the economy, as they have for decades, even though Republicans have presided over economic calamities in 1987, 2001, 2008, and 2020. But how negative, or neutral, voters feel come November will matter. The economy has continued to add jobs quickly, although the rate of growth slowed in April. The generally solid economy would seem to be good news for Biden and Democrats, except that it means the Federal Reserve is less likely to reduce interest rates as its board tries to keep inflation in check.
4. These Men and Women Are Nihilists
My colleague Derek Thompson has written about the tranche of voters who just seem to want chaos and upheaval, and the Times/Siena poll turns up more information about them. More than half of Americans, 55 percent, say the political and economic system needs major changes; 14 percent say it should be torn down entirely. Only about a quarter think Biden would make major changes or tear it down, versus 70 percent who say Trump would. Voters who think that Biden’s changes would be good are in roughly equal proportion to those who think they would be bad (each about a quarter). For Trump, 43 percent say his changes would be good, while 35 percent say they’d be bad. Unsurprisingly, Trump leads among tear-it-all-down voters, but overall the results are a bit incoherent. (As I have written, Trump’s anti-system pose is a sham; his biggest changes would be to weaken democracy and to enrich himself and his allies.)
5. Biden’s Status-Quo Problem
Here’s the flip side of the burn-it-all-down matter: In 2020, Biden ran promising a return to normalcy after the Trump years. In some ways, he has delivered that—the chaotic White House no longer dominates the news—but in other ways, it has been beyond his control, as in the case of sustained inflation. Either way, voters aren’t pleased with the status quo, and as long as the election is a referendum on that, Biden will struggle. This leaves the president in the difficult position of trying to both tout stability and norms but also promise change from his own first term. The fact is that Biden has set in motion some major structural reforms in the U.S. economy, but many of those changes are either little understood by voters or too slow to have shown up yet.
6. Judgment Day
With each passing week, the chances increase that the only trial Trump faces before Election Day is the current one in Manhattan, on charges that he falsified business records to cover up a sexual liaison. That’s good news for the former president, who has managed to stall the other cases against him. The bad news is that the Manhattan trial has highlighted some things that have always made a sizable block of voters nervous about Trump: his lies, his scandals, and his tendency to create drama and disorder. But what effect this will have, if any, is a little murky: Polls suggest that a felony conviction would lose him some votes, but how many is hard to predict. Trump is also dealing with some civil cases. Generally, news about his legal issues seems to both solidify his base and turn off other voters whom he needs to build a winning majority.
7. The Return of Split Tickets?
Once upon a time, voters routinely split their votes between Democrats and Republicans. But as the two have sorted into homogenous conservative and liberal parties, and as Americans have become more polarized, ticket-splitting is less and less common. Could it make a rebound this year? Well, maybe. The Times/Siena poll shows Democrats leading in U.S. Senate races in Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania—even as Biden trails in all three in the same poll. In Michigan, Democrats have made gains in recent years, but Biden looks shaky. In Ohio, Democrats hope that Senator Sherrod Brown can win, although Trump is expected to carry the state; in deep-blue Maryland, Republican Larry Hogan, a popular former governor, may have the edge for an open Senate seat. The question is whether voters actually follow through come November, or end up closer to the recent pattern of mostly voting a straight ticket.
8. The Third-Party Factor
Both the Biden and Trump teams seem rattled by the resilience of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign; Kennedy is now polling around 10 percent on average. Which of the two major candidates he might hurt more is hard to say, and polls have been equivocal on this point. Trump’s campaign has recently unleashed broadsides against Kennedy, and Biden’s allies have started to pound him too. Even so, third-party candidates tend to fade as the election draws closer, and Kennedy may follow the same pattern. A key question is whether he gets invited to the presidential debates with Biden and Trump. Neither the Green Party nominee, Jill Stein, nor the independent Cornel West will be onstage, but in tightly contested swing states, they too could win enough votes to give Trump victory.