Joe Biden’s secret weapon
It’s still way too early to be trying to size up what the 2024 presidential election will look like. Donald Trump, increasingly senile and now just nine days from the start of his first criminal trial, may not even make it to the election.
But if you want to try to parse things, you’d start with the fact that President Joe Biden and Trump are roughly tied in 2024 polling. Then you’d look at the fact that the polls are trending slightly in Biden’s direction. When you consider the fact that Democratic candidates have outperformed the polls in basically every election over the past three years, it’s fair to presume that Biden is ahead. But no lead is enough to make you sleep at night when the opposition is so monstrous, right? The good news is that Biden has a secret weapon.
I’m not talking about Trump’s aforementioned senility, though that’ll be a major factor. Nor am I talking about the polling that says Trump will lose a significant number of his non-base supporters if and when he’s convicted of felonies at trial. Instead I’m talking about a storyline that has nothing to do with Trump, and is right in front of us.
These days James Carville is mainly known for saying bizarrely offensive things. But if you go back a few decades, back when he was trying to win elections instead of trying to get attention, Carville once famously said that it’s “the economy, stupid.” The point is that when the economy is strong, and more importantly when the public believes that the economy is strong, swing voters tend to favor the incumbent President.
Keep in mind that “swing voters” are not the people who get trotted out for TV town halls. If it’s three weeks before the election and you still haven’t decided which party to vote for, you’re either lying for attention, or you’re so cluelessly indecisive that you’re not going to end up voting at all.
The real swing voters consist of two distinct groups. The first group hasn’t decided whether to vote Democratic or stay home. The second group leans Republican but hasn’t decided whether to vote Republican or stay home. If you’re a Democratic candidate, you’re hoping the first group will turn out for you, and the second group will stay home.
This brings us back to the economy. If you sort of like Biden but you’re not yet sure if you’re going to make the effort to actually go vote for him, a booming economy makes for a great tiebreaker. You may not be Biden’s biggest fan, but you like that the economy is strong, and you’re worried that the other guy might screw that up.
Similarly, if you dislike Biden but you’re not sure if you dislike him enough to go vote for a clown like Trump, you might well end up thinking “Oh well, the economy is strong, I’ll just stay home and let Biden have it.”
This isn’t just theory. It’s how Bill Clinton won in 1992, with James Carville’s help. The economy was widely perceived as weak, and so both groups of swing voters leaned away from the incumbent George Bush and toward the challenger Bill Clinton. Once Clinton was in office and the economy rebounded, it helped set him up for a fairly dominant reelection in 1996.
One thing that’s worried me over the past few years is that even after Trump broke the economy and Biden turned it around, the media (on both sides) was still focused solely on bad news like inflation, instead of good news like job growth and economic growth. Most Americans, on all political sides, believed that the Biden economy was bad – even if they were seeing the economy improve around them. People tend to believe what the media (unanimously) tells them, more than what they see with their own eyes.
But something happened a few months back, where the Biden economy became so overwhelmingly strong that the media figured the public was going to notice anyway, and thus started admitting it. The mainstream media is now indeed admitting on a regular basis that the economy is booming. Sometimes even Fox News feels compelled to admit it, because the strong economy is so obvious that even Fox’s audience can see it, even if they still don’t like Biden.
And so President Biden’s secret weapon for 2024 is that most Americans now believe the economy is strong and growing and heading in the right direction. Economically speaking, they want more of this. That ends up being the difference between a Democratic-leaning swing voter turning out for Biden or lazily staying home, and the difference between a Republican-leaning swing voter turning out for Trump or lazily staying home.
Joe Biden in 2024 is, economically speaking, Bill Clinton in 1996. This doesn’t mean Biden is automatically going to win. Nothing is a given, especially these days. If you want to make sure Biden wins, you need to be out there phone banking, volunteering, sharing his donation links, you name it (you should be doing this now by the way, not waiting until October). But if you want a reason why Biden is likely to win in 2024 if you help put in the work that’s always required to win, the answer is simple: it’s the economy.
