President Biden and Donald Trump are tied in the early 2024 Election polls, and what many observers have described as “the longest election” in modern American history.
The 2024 presidential election is shaping up to be a last-man-standing fight between challenger Donald Trump and reigning champion Joe Biden where the two participants fight until they collapse or are otherwise unable to continue. Trump has manic crazy energy; President Biden is wise, weathered, tough, and experienced. In a fair fight, Biden stands more than a good chance of winning. Unfortunately, this fight is anything but fair. In a repeat of 2016, the mainstream news media appears to be actively rigging the outcome by quite literally holding up Donald Trump.
To that point, last weekend, instead of focusing on Donald Trump’s threats to be a dictator on day one of his “presidency” when/if he takes office in 2025, plans for mass deportations and concentration camps, and his gangster-like extortion of NATO and telling Putin to invade Europe, the New York Times wrote this fawning profile:
Mr. Trump, by contrast, does not appear to be suffering the effects of time in such visible ways. Mr. Trump often dyes his hair and appears unnaturally tan. He is heavyset and tall, and he uses his physicality to project strength in front of crowds. When he takes the stage at rallies, he basks in adulation for several minutes, dancing to an opening song, and then holds forth in speeches replete with macho rhetoric and bombast that typically last well over an hour, a display of stamina.
By comparison, at Bloomberg, Nia-Malika Henderson neatly summarizes the differences between Biden and Trump and what is at stake in the 2024 election: “The choice in November isn’t between two old men. It’s between an unhinged, wannabe dictator and a stable, well-meaning leader who believes in America’s bedrock principals of freedom and democracy.”
In an attempt to gain some clarity about this bewildering “longest election ever”, what the early public opinion polls mean or not, and how many professional political observers and operatives are deeply concerned that the 2024 election is increasingly feeling like a repeat of the disastrous 2016 Election, I recently asked a range of experts for their thoughts and suggestions.
Norm Ornstein is an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and contributing editor for The Atlantic.
Much of our national press remains in shock over missing the grassroots support for Trump in 2016; I see few signs of the shock abating. Our press is inclined to focus on the odds and horse-race coverage, often overlooking the stakes of electoral outcomes; this partly explains the press’s obsessions over alleged Biden shortcomings (lack of memory recall, for example), while mostly laughing off similar Trump shortcomings.
It’s true in every election: lots feel dissatisfied with their choices. Our press overlooks this. Come November, though, any lack of enthusiasm will cede to the reality of the volatility of a second Trump presidency. It’s a future conversation, but a reckoning of our national media is imminent. Not that polls this far out, no matter how good, are very meaningful. But polls are a huge asset for media organizations that want to do horserace all the time. Instead, they should focus like a laser on the stakes of the election.
Joe Walsh was a Republican congressman and a leading Tea Party conservative. He is now a prominent conservative voice against Donald Trump and the host of the podcast "White Flag With Joe Walsh."
I’m feeling the same I’ve felt since the beginning of the primaries: there is no primary. Nothing has changed. This was always Trump’s nomination, and as long as Biden stays alive, he was always going to be the nominee. I’ve been resigned from the very beginning of this that the man who led a violent attempt to overthrow an American election would be his party’s nominee and has a decent chance of becoming president again. This will be the longest general election which plays to Trump’s strength because it will create apathy, and the more apathy, the better for Trump.
What we know right now is that this general election is going to very close electorally. We know that this is going to be much more of a persuasion election than the experts think. The experts think it’s just going to be a turnout election because everyone knows Trump and Biden so well, but I think that’s wrong. I think there are a lot of voters now genuinely torn between Biden and Trump. And I know that each man is wrestling with an unfitness problem - Trump, because he’s a criminal, traitorous psychopath, Biden because he’s too old. So, this election will come down to whose unacceptability is a greater concern to the voters. This is not a turnout election. In fact, a lot of voters who voted for Biden in 2020 may vote for Trump this year. The experts are missing this.
We are living in a populist moment, experts still don’t recognize this, Democrats don’t understand this, Trump feeds off of it. Voters are angry, voters well beyond the GOP base. Biden is a typical old establishment politician. Trump is perceived as a non-politician, as a disrupter, which is nonsense, but it plays in this populist moment. Combine that with Biden’s age problem, with the Israel/Gaza war, and Biden has real problems. And people have forgotten how chaotic Trump’s four years were. Short memories. We’re too far removed. Now they look at him and laugh again. They don’t understand how dangerous he is. Right now, unless Biden embraces his age, is honest and real about it, and has fun with it, he’ll lose.
Most Americans do not understand how broken our politics are, how anti-democratic my former political party is, and how divided we the people are. They don't understand what’s at stake in this election. If we don’t wake up, Trump, an insurrectionist, becomes president again.
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters."
Despite myself, I have never felt more confident that Democrats will have a very good election this year. I touch on this in the bit about polling below, but I am a big believer in past results instead of conjecture.
I am not sure I have seen the Democratic base this motivated for this long in my lifetime. Their string of victories dating back to 2017 is impressive. No reason to believe this will suddenly end in the biggest election of our lifetimes. I think Roe will be the absolute deciding issue. Just impossible to imagine that a majority of women will walk into a voting booth and pull the lever to have their rights taken away from them.
As to the longest election in U.S. history, I reckon we have been in full election mode since that terrible blast on November 8, 2016. That’s why when you bump into an ardent Democrat it looks like they haven’t had a good night’s sleep in seven years — because they most likely haven’t. There was never any true resolution in 2020. Instead of conceding and turning the page, we were treated to a nuclear-powered temper tantrum, and the most loathsome behavior by a political loser in history, which ended with the attempted coup.
Many people forget that the night before Trump and his Republicans tried to incinerate our votes on January 6, the Democrats took the Senate by winning the two races in Georgia. So much for enjoying the fruits of our success. When we win in November, there should be parades.
If I never see another poll again, it will be too soon. I recently wrote about this. Polls are completely worthless, and nearly always wrong. As I say in my piece, even so-called experts like the New York Time’s Nate Cohn (or a wary editor) have taken to inserting this line into their stories on polling: “The limitations of polling are well known, especially almost a year before an election.”
I’m sorry, what? This is absurd. They are literally admitting the veracity of their polling is limited, so why bother with them?
The most important data out there is the actual results of all the elections since November 8, 2016. It’s hard to think of one key election out of hundreds that Democrats lost or didn’t over-perform in. The examples are endless, but for this exercise I’ll focus on my home state of Wisconsin. Since 2017, Democrats and/or the Left have won 14 of 17 statewide elections. This might be the most “battlegroundy” of the battleground states, and Democrats have been winning at an impressive clip up here.
In the state supreme court race last April to decide which side would control the court, Trump and abortion rights were front and center on the ballot. The liberal justice, Janet Protaciewicz, won that race by a whopping +11 against her Trumpy opponent. Again, this is a deep-purple state. Trust me, that gigantic win sent shockwaves through the Republican Party, because it looks like Trump and abortion rights will be on the top of the ballot again in November.
Finally, if you really want to get my hackles up, which is an easy trick these days, ask me why in the hell a media that is supposed to report on the news, tries to make news with these damn polls. It’s journalistic malpractice.
I think we all had flashbacks to 2016 with the release of this loaded Special Counsel Hur report that exonerated Biden in his handling of classified documents. Hur's attack on Biden’s age — even to suggest he allegedly couldn’t remember the year of his son Beau’s death " within several years" — was brutally partisan, and proof the GOP will stop at nothing and say and/or do anything to win.
It is incredible to me that upon review, Attorney General Merrick Garland allowed that into the report. I am also flabbergasted that the White House didn't have a ready response to it, given they got an executive review on the report before it went public. This was a very, very bad day for Biden, and an unforced error. They’ll probably survive it, but if this came out in October, it might have been fatal. They simply must do better combating these ageist attacks because they will be coming one after another until the election.
Finally, it underlined again what a disastrous job Garland has done as AG. Even former AG Eric Holder piled on in “X” post. “[The report] contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long-standing DOJ traditions. Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised.”
Wow.
So, yes, the issues — women’s rights, democracy, guns, environment, etc. — are with the Democrats, but will that be enough to get them across the finish line? I believe they will, but, again, they must do better at punching back at what’s coming from Republicans. They could even stand to start punching down more.
And, PLEASE, message better on the work that went into laying the groundwork that has led to the best economy in the world. The more that story is told, the better.
Are you listening, media?
Rich Logis is a former right-wing pundit and high-ranking Trump supporter. He describes himself as "a remorseful ex-Trump, DeSantis and GOP voter."
“The most important election of our lifetime” is typical election speak. The 2024 election, however, is not merely the most important of our lives: it’s the most significant in the life of our nation. A second Trump presidency will irreparably damage our democracy, and there is no nation comparable to the U.S. whose democracy was permanently fissured; we have no example—past, or present—to look to for guidance. The understandable anxiety about the survival of America’s republican (lower-case r) form of government is why the next nine months will be the longest we’ve ever felt.
There are reasons for some optimism. No one should construe this prognostication as justification for not voting, but I maintain that the GOP and MAGA will be historically repudiated in November: in addition to what I expect will be the highest-ever turnout of single-issue, blue voters, I believe Trump will be convicted in Georgia and the two federal cases. The majority of Americans will decide that their lives, livelihoods, children’s education and entitlements are not well-served with a convicted felon, facing de facto life sentences, as President. No, the popular vote doesn’t matter in presidential races, but President Biden will, possibly, receive 100 million votes, thus ensuring Election Day victories for Democrats up and down ballots, in a night that will shock the nation comparably to Trump’s victory.
I’m an ex-MAGA activist; I’m now empowering others to leave MAGA, tell their stories, reconcile with friends and family and lead to help others lead. Yes, a tall, tall task. However, I believe an electoral renunciation of the GOP will begin to slowly create feelings of remorse amongst some percentage of MAGA voters.
Much of our national press remains in shock over missing the grassroots support for Trump in 2016; I see few signs of the shock abating. Our press is inclined to focus on the odds and horse-race coverage, often overlooking the stakes of electoral outcomes; this partly explains the press’s obsessions over alleged Biden shortcomings (lack of memory recall, for example), while mostly laughing off similar Trump shortcomings. It’s true in every election: lots feel dissatisfied with their choices. Our press overlooks this. Come November, though, any lack of enthusiasm will cede to the reality of the volatility of a second Trump presidency. It’s a future conversation, but a reckoning of our national media is imminent.
One of the primary reasons we’ve endured is because Americans have instinctually formed unlikely, but necessary alliances, when the order and stability of democratic institutions were acutely threatened. Our current epoch will, I believe, see such an alliance. Does all this mean Biden and the Democrats are guaranteed to win? No; hubris was one of Hillary’s flaws in 2016, and it was, also, the press’s: media from The New York Times to Fox, and everyone in-between expected a convincing win for Hillary. I understand why it’s hard to shake the 2016 feelings of déjà vu; our nation is still reeling from Trump’s win, which I contributed to, as a one-time MAGA true believer. But I have confidence and faith in the Democrats’ abilities to starkly contrast themselves from MAGA. If we play like we’re ahead in the score, and want to stay ahead, we will have perfected our union and democracy. Progress is always accompanied by struggle and strains. I don’t believe the American experiment of self-government is ready to come to an end. It is prudent, however, to remember that it’s a thin line between strength and fragility.
Brynn Tannehill is a journalist and author of "American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy."
I find myself between despair and resignation. Things are developing more or less as I expected. The polls just get worse for Biden. The news just gets worse for the Biden campaign. Republicans have basically stopped pretending to be anything other than dedicated to bringing about the end of the U.S. as we know it and are not even pretending to govern in the meantime. Trump was always the presumptive nominee, and here we are.
As for the length of the campaign: the polls for Biden and Trump barely budged from March 2020 onwards. We'll see the same here: as I wrote for TNR: the results are already basically baked in because almost everyone already knows the candidates. Unfortunately, just enough Americans have forgotten the shambolic first Trump administration to think it might be better a second time around, or see it with (very) rose-tinted glasses.
What jumps out at me are several things. The first is that even the average of the top-quality polls says Biden is losing narrowly in the national vote. Second, the Electoral College bias says that if Trump narrowly wins the popular vote, it's a near certainty he will get 270 EC votes. People on the left keep latching on to outlier (positive) results, dismissing the quality polls that say Biden is losing, and it reminds me so much of 2016. Democrats simply cannot believe that Trump will win. And I'm saying, barring another black swan event, he will be President again.
Then, the real horror starts. Most people have no idea how bad it will get, and how fast. We're talking Enabling Acts fast.
My head and heart tell me the same thing: Trump will win again in 2024, and it won't even be as close as 2016. The fascist movement is ascendant, Biden is terribly unpopular, and important segments of his base (young people, Muslims) are vowing to stay away from the polls in 2024. Basically, I think his goose is cooked. Sadly, many of people who are deserting him radically under-estimate how bad a second term Trump administration will be for them, personally. For example, I think the trans community in the U.S. will effectively disappear within 4 years of a Trump administration. I think Trump will follow the lead of the evangelicals and encourage events in Israel that they believe will result in the battle of Armageddon.
They want chaos and death.
Once again, the media in the U.S. is treating this like a horse race, when in reality, this is the November 1932 election in the Weimar Republic. If we choose poorly based on disappointment that Biden didn't deliver us the pony we wanted, we're instead going to get a bullet to the back of the head next to a long ditch. A second Trump presidency is a non-survivable event for many people, and certainly the nation. We will either Balkanize or fall into abject fascism. But whichever we end up with, we cease to be the United States as we knew it.
