NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I n late June, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made the biggest mistake you can make in politics: He was honest.
After asking himself if Trump was “the strongest” candidate Republicans could nominate to face Joe Biden during an interview on CNBC, McCarthy answered himself: “I don’t know that answer,” he confessed, “but can anybody beat Biden? Yeah, anybody can beat Biden.”
“Trump world flipped out” over that barely perceptible note of intellectual humility, and the former president’s camp successfully badgered McCarthy into revising his remarks. “The only reason Biden is using his weaponized federal government to go after President Trump is because he is Biden’s strongest political opponent,” McCarthy, now a hostage, declaimed. After all, the speaker added, that is what “polling continues to show.”
The notion that polls of next year’s general election indicate that the former president is Biden’s strongest opponent features prominently in the arguments Trump surrogates make in the former president’s favor. But is it true? On a superficial level, the gold-standard New York Times/Sienna survey reinforces the notion that a 2024 race between Biden and Trump will be competitive.
That survey found Trump and Biden tied at 43 percent apiece in a head-to-head matchup. An incumbent president with Joe Biden’s moribund favorability and job-approval ratings languishing in the low 40s in a contest against a polarizing figure like the former president is vulnerable. But a glance under this poll’s hood suggests Biden has room to recover when voters tune into the 2024 general election. By contrast, Donald Trump’s deficits will be far more difficult to overcome.
At the moment, Biden wins the support of just 83 percent of self-identified Democrats in an election against Trump. That figure is weighed down by the fact that a significant minority within his party (42 percent) want Democrats to nominate someone — anyone — other than Joe Biden. By contrast, 88 percent of Republicans line up behind Trump. In 2020, both Biden and Trump won 94 percent of the vote from their respective partisans, and it’s reasonable to expect that disaffected voters will “come home” to their party’s nominees following a prolonged and polarizing general election campaign.
In 2020, independent voters favored the party out of the White House, which is not atypical. But in 2022, independents broke for the party in control of the White House in enough key races to rob the GOP of significant congressional majorities despite widespread economic malaise and dissatisfaction with Democratic governance. Trump’s looming presence over the midterm elections certainly contributed to that unusual dynamic, and his renomination will invite a repeat of those circumstances.
Likewise, this poll indicates that Biden can only count on the votes of seven-in-ten African Americans, less than half of all women, and just 47 percent of voters under the age of 29. In 2020, Biden won 87 percent of the black vote, which is only slightly less than Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Also that year, Joe Biden won two-thirds of the youth vote and a majority of voters aged 25–29, and he beat Trump among women with 57 percent of the vote. Donald Trump will have to improve on his 2020 performance among these and other core demographics to beat Biden in 2024 like he couldn’t in 2020. This poll suggests that will be a struggle for the former president.
Generally speaking, the criminal allegations against Donald Trump do not concern Republican voters, but the same cannot be said for the general electorate. A majority told pollsters that the former president “has committed serious federal crimes,” whereas only 35 percent disagree with that. And just 27 percent of those who disagree told pollsters Trump “did not do anything wrong.”
Very few Americans believe Donald Trump is the blameless victim of a conspiracy designed to malign him. It will be difficult to argue those voters out of that impression, but the Trump campaign will have to expend vast sums of political capital to make that case at the expense of more relevant political arguments for his candidacy. That herculean effort will be made all the more difficult by the fact that Trump will spend a significant portion 2024 inside courtrooms arguing for his freedom.
Trump’s behavior after the 2020 election complicates that effort further. Fifty-three percent of respondents believe that Donald Trump “went so far that he threatened American democracy” in his efforts to challenge the 2020 presidential-election results. Only 39 percent believe his campaign was just exercising its legal right to contest the results. The Biden campaign is going to devote significant resources to reminding voters of how Trump’s behavior culminated in the January 6 riots. The Trump campaign will be forced to play defense on an issue that is a proven electoral loser for the GOP.
Without question, Joe Biden’s biggest liability right now is his handling of the economy, which 49 percent of the public presently rate as “poor.” Moreover, 65 percent of the voting public says the country is on the wrong track. But 37 percent of that 65 percent go further still, saying that “our problems are so bad that America is in danger of failing as a nation.” Are high costs of living the only factor contributing to that level of catastrophism? That seems unlikely. And since nearly one-fifth of Democratic voters and fully one-third of college-educated whites (a demographic that gravitated toward Biden in 2020) share that view, it’s quite possible that some of that sentiment is attributable to the former president’s fixed presence in American political life.
Typically, incumbent presidents try to avoid the circumstances in which voters head to the polls to render an up or down verdict on their first four years in office. The classic reelection formula is to incept in voters’ minds that their vote is a “choice” between their candidate and the other guy — a guy the incumbent’s camp has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars and six straight months defining in negative terms. If Trump is nominated again, Joe Biden and his allies don’t have to worry about the grueling spadework that is usually necessary to “define” their opponent. Rather, it will be the Trump campaign that will have to reintroduce their candidate to the nation in ways that overcome — or, at least, mute — the public’s misgivings about his alleged criminal misconduct and his comportment in the wake of his 2020 loss.
Could Donald Trump win the White House again? Sure. Anything is possible. But this poll doesn’t suggest that Donald Trump is anything like Joe Biden’s toughest possible 2024 opponent. Indeed, Trump’s renomination would give Democrats the opportunity to divert resources they would otherwise dedicate to negatively defining a lesser-known Republican toward crucial down-ballot contests.