Back in September, after debate season had commenced, I wrote a piece looking ahead to what most could already see would be the main event: “Donald Trump Genuinely Could Win Again, and I Hope You Understand What That Means.” (I still don’t think most people truly have come to terms with what it means, but set that aside for now.) Underlying the entire piece was my nauseated feeling that there was a real chance that the political priors upon which I was basing my analysis might just be wrong:

[Democrats] assume, correctly I believe, Trump’s inevitability as the GOP nominee, and they are waiting until he formally wins it (which should be obvious enough by South Carolina if not before then) to resurrect the ghost that so bracingly spooked the American electorate back in November 2022: the January 6 riots and the madness of Trump’s assault on our entire electoral system to keep him in office. It was an extremely effective tactic back then, as all remember. . . .

But. But. In 2022, the class of “mini-Trumps” were just that: mini-Trumps. There is only one real Donald Trump. You can explain it in terms of his charisma, his policies, or however you please; I explain it empirically by pointing out that his voters showed up for him in both 2016 and (remember how much this surprised most observers) 2020 as well, and when they did, for the most part, they also voted Republican down-ballot. Have the events of January 6 altered that dynamic? I would have to think so. But maybe Joe Biden’s countervailing weaknesses, as already discussed, are just so unsurvivable that it doesn’t matter, and he loses anyway.

I am still fascinated by that possibility, and who could blame me when looking at the most recent numbers? As I wrote yesterday, the most recent swing-state polls are brutal for Joe Biden — he is being clobbered in every relevant one according to Bloomberg — even as more and more surveys show him retaining an advantage nationally over Trump. That could be a recipe for a 2016-like outcome — or for a 2020-like one. And despite the fact that Biden’s decrepitude, incompetence, and corruption have made this a genuinely competitive race, I still believe he is favored over Trump.

So I wanted to explain why, as things presently stand, I think Biden is better positioned to win nine months from now. I speak only for myself, and it seemed sporting to lay out my priors and assumptions in one place, if for no other reason than to give people a helpful resource to refer back to later when dunking on me for being comically wrong. This is the underlying framework that shapes how I analyze the campaign.

First, a key qualification: We do not yet know what the final shape of the 2024 general election field will look like. Yes, we know that the Democratic and Republican nominees will be Joe Biden and Donald Trump — again, alas. But we do not know what kind of campaign Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is yet going to mount. (He performs with Perot-like numbers in early polls but will get absolutely zero help from a debateless general-election season and a mainstream media intensely hostile to the idea of promoting a potential spoiler candidacy.) It is also still possible that a more moderate, centrist No Labels–style candidate might mount a protest bid. These developments would complicate this analysis immensely (simply because they are chaos factors), maybe fatally.

But in a head-to-head matchup between Biden and Trump, the 2024 presidential election will come down to the choice that educated suburban voters, who want neither of these candidates, make between the two. They decide the fate of several states, including those that have been recently slipping away from the GOP’s column. Trump’s base is locked in and would lie down in traffic for him — some of them quite literally, I suspect — but they amount to at most 60–70 percent of a severely fractured Republican Party that is itself a distinct minority in the American electorate. Meanwhile, Joe Biden has no base to speak of — not when nearly 80 percent of his own party’s voters wish he was not running again. He has only reliable Democratic voters to fall back on, who vote their cultural/ideological and policy priorities ahead of whoever is specifically at the top of ticket.

That means the great unaligned masses of the country are going to have their say. I think it very possible that Trump will do quite well among both the working class and Hispanics in 2024 — look for Michigan and Nevada to return unusually strong numbers for him this cycle — just as Biden can count on single women of nearly all ages to support him (more accurately, to oppose Trump) in overwhelming numbers. But what of that once core strength of the Republican party, suburban educated voters? The GOP’s heartlands in many of the 2016/2020/2024 swing states have long been these enclaves of voters (e.g., crucial Waukesha County, Wis., Oakland County, Mich., or the collar counties of suburban Philadelphia). And while they are more than ready to move on from Biden if given an option, many of these voters have turned irrevocably away from Trump over the last two presidential cycles.

Trump threaded the 2016 needle miraculously because, while he lost significant numbers of educated Republican voters in blood-red enclaves like the Milwaukee and Detroit suburbs, he managed to pick up more than enough typically Democratic or low-propensity white working-class voters amid anemic black turnout to steal three key states from the Democrats’ Midwestern electoral bulwark. Those three states remain in play eight years later — but this time, far more ominously, Trump’s own issues (as well as demographic trends) have sent Arizona and Georgia swinging Democratic and need to be clawed back as a predicate to any plausible victory. (Georgia should come back to the GOP more easily; the Donald Trump–Kari Lake ticket in Arizona, however, is a different question.)

But, for the most part, persuadable educated suburban voters in these states hate Trump now. Not all of them, obviously — and some of those who do will suck it up and vote for him regardless because for them Biden is even worse — but vast swaths of them. These are the men and women — especially women — Trump has been shedding from the Republican coalition cycle over cycle, a trend clearly traceable in his numbers (as well as the Republican Party and Trump-branded candidates’ fortunes) since 2016. Trump’s various sexual misbehaviors and assault, his vulgarity and coarseness, and most of all January 6 and the paranoid style of politics infecting the Republican Party it represents — the reasons why these voters have run away from Trump and are not coming back are overdetermined. But the economy is terrible, you say? Well, not so much for these voters during recent quarters, actually. And if that continues through Election Day, there’s always a chance that, while prices remain irrevocably inflated because of Biden’s wildly irresponsible stimulus and spending bills, once price instability is no longer a thing they will set aside their gripes in the face of letting Trump return to power.

And these are the likeliest of all voters. Biden’s weakness in the polling is not an illusion; his abysmal 38 percent job approval rating is proof enough that America is so ready to move on from him that he would be bulldozed by literally any other Republican nominee for president. But I would argue it is deceptive right now because his campaign machine has not yet begun to really operate; over half a billion dollars (easily) is about to be spent reminding America — and the high-propensity suburban swing voters I described above in particular — about who Donald Trump is.

The news will collaborate with the narrative, for Trump himself will be spending most of the spring and summer in court defending himself against an array of state and federal charges. Regardless of one’s opinion on the merits of the E. Jean Carroll damage award, it is a political fact that exists, and only fools will discount its effect on female voters (married ones in particular). And there Trump will be nearly every single day, running his campaign out of courtroom press conferences or midnight rants on Truth Social. Oh, did I mention the RNC is broke and most of the money being donated directly to Trump by small donors is going directly to pay his legal bills? The Republicans are going to be crushed like a grape in terms of spending this fall, and money still matters in elections.

These are the underlying considerations that lead me to think that, while the 2024 election will be as close as the last two, the advantage still remains with Joe Biden. But here’s the thing: What if I’m completely wrong? Leave aside the effect some kind of unpredictable external event would have on shaking up the dynamics of the race — though at this point one wonders if it is even proper to speak of something like Biden breaking his hip as “unpredictable.” What if everything I just said is right, and none of it matters?

What if the economy collapses, or perceptions on it fail to shift? What if people are hit with a barrage of media messaging reminding them that Trump brags about grabbing women by their feline-metaphor parts and once tried to overthrow the government, and enough of them say to themselves, “Sure, but Joe Biden can’t finish a sentence anymore”? (What if a regional wear breaks out in the Middle East, for that matter?) What if my assumptions of how voters are going to behave once the rubber meets the road are off, or simply overwhelmed by events? I can only console myself with the fact that it sure won’t have been the first time.