An Early, Early Look at Biden’s 2024 Prospects

With Donald J. Trump indicted, Ron DeSantis faltering in the polls and Democrats still basking in their strong midterm showing, some might feel that President Biden’s re-election is all but a done deal.

But as Mr. Biden announced his re-election bid Tuesday, it’s worth noting something about the early 2024 polling: The race looks close.

Almost every recent survey shows a highly competitive presidential race. On average, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by 1.4 percentage points so far this year. Mr. DeSantis even leads Mr. Biden, by less than a point.

Now, to be clear: I don’t think you should put a lot of stock in general election polls quite yet. But no one should be terribly confident about the outcome of a general election at this early stage either. If there were any case for early confidence, it ought to be reflected in the early polls. If Mr. Trump is doomed, why isn’t he getting trounced in the polls?

At the very least, Mr. Biden seems to have his work cut out for him. His job approval and favorability ratings remain stuck in the low 40s. This makes him quite a bit weaker than in 2020, when polls showed that voters generally had a favorable view of him. Or put differently: While the 2020 election was decided by voters who liked Mr. Biden and didn’t like Mr. Trump, today it seems the 2024 election could be decided by voters who dislike both candidates.

Why is Mr. Biden faring so poorly? The causes of his weak ratings have been up for debate since they tanked in August 2021. The withdrawal from Afghanistan, the surging Delta variant of the coronavirus, a stalled legislative agenda and the beginnings of inflation were all seen as possible theories. Today, all of those explanations seem to be in retreat — the story line of support for Ukraine against Russia has supplanted Afghanistan; the trend line on inflation shows some promise; Covid deaths are at their lowest point in three years — but Mr. Biden remains unpopular.

At this stage, three basic possibilities remain. One is that the overall political environment remains unfavorable, presumably because of persistent inflation and partisan polarization. If so, any president in these straits would have low approval ratings and struggle until voters felt their economic fortunes were improving.

Another possibility is that Mr. Biden’s early stumbles did unusual and lasting damage to perceptions of his leadership competence, probably related to his age (80). If this is true, he may not find it easy to restore the nation’s confidence as long as he doesn’t look the part.

The final possibility is that the conditions may be in place for Mr. Biden’s ratings to rebound. It would not be the first time: Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and even Mr. Trump (before coronavirus) saw their approval ratings increase from the low 40s in the two years before re-election. In this scenario, Mr. Biden’s ratings would increase as a crucial segment of voters judged him against the alternatives, rather than in isolation. His re-election campaign would offer a more forceful and energetic defense of his performance, perhaps against the backdrop of low unemployment and fading inflation.

Historically, the third possibility seems more likely. Mr. Biden’s age shouldn’t be understated as a legitimate factor, but he won despite his age last time, and incumbent presidents usually win re-election. The large number of voters who dislike Mr. Trump and once liked Mr. Biden create upside. The direction of the economy will be a crucial variable, of course, but at least for now the combination of low unemployment and slowly fading inflation would seem to provide enough ammunition for Mr. Biden to make his case. Still, his ratings are low enough today that they could improve markedly without securing his re-election.

Three kinds of voters appear to loom large as Mr. Biden tries to reassemble the coalition that brought him to the White House in 2020: young voters, nonwhite voters and perhaps low-income voters as well. In the most recent surveys, Mr. Biden is badly underperforming among these groups. Overall, he could be running at least a net 10 points behind what he earned in 2020 among each of these groups, helping to explain why the early general election polls show a close race.

Mr. Biden has shown weakness among all of these groups at various times before, so it is not necessarily surprising that he’s struggling among them again with his approval rating in the low 40s. Still, they crystallize the various challenges ahead of his campaign: his age, the economy, and voters who won’t be won over on issues like abortion or democratic principles. In his announcement video on Tuesday, Mr. Biden devoted almost all of his attention to rights, freedom, democracy and abortion. He’ll probably need a way to speak to people who are animated by more material, economic concerns than abstract liberal values.

A final wild card is the Electoral College. Even if Mr. Biden does win the national vote by a modest margin, Mr. Trump could assemble a winning coalition in the battleground states that decide the presidency, as he did in 2016.

In 2020, Mr. Biden won the national vote by 4.4 percentage points, but barely squeaked out wins by less than one percentage point in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. To win, he needed one of the three.

At the moment, there’s a case the Electoral College will be less favorable to Mr. Trump, relative to the national vote, than it was in 2020. In the midterm elections, the gap between the popular vote for U.S. House and a hypothetical Electoral College result based on the House vote essentially evaporated, down from nearly four points in 2020. It’s possible this was simply a product of unusually poor Republican nominees at the top of the ticket in many of the most competitive states, but there are plausible reasons it might also reflect underlying electoral trends.

The renewed importance of abortion, for instance, might help Democrats most in relatively white, secular areas, which would tend to help them more in the Northern battlegrounds than elsewhere. “Democracy” may also play well as an issue in the battlegrounds, as these are the very states where the stop-the-steal movement threatened to overturn the results of the last election. Meanwhile, Mr. Biden’s relative weakness among nonwhite voters, who are disproportionately concentrated in noncompetitive states, might do more to hurt his tallies in states like California or Illinois than Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.

Given the idiosyncratic and localized nature of last year’s midterm results, it would be a mistake to be confident that the Republican Electoral College advantage is coming to an end. If that edge persists, the modest Biden lead in national polls today wouldn’t be enough for him to secure re-election.