For Republicans, it could be a very happy new year indeed. The 2024 elections hold the potential for a trifecta: winning unified control of the federal government, including all its elected branches, for the first time in eight years.
“Could” is the operative word, however. Republicans have an opportunity, but they must capitalize on it to bring their electoral dreams to fruition.
BIDEN'S EIGHT MOST NOTABLE GAFFES OF 2023
The fact that it takes more than good poll numbers and flawed opponents to win in a polarized political climate can itself be summed up in one of the most futile phrases of the past few years: the “red wave.”
Just two years ago, Republicans looked to have a chance to make big gains in Congress and a slew of down-ballot races. They massively underperformed, barely winning the House and actually losing ground in the Senate. Many of the factors that led to this mediocre outcome remain in play as the calendar turns to 2024: infighting, bad or extreme Republican candidates, an inability to keep the focus on President Joe Biden, an unwillingness to grapple with how the reversal of Roe v. Wade altered the politics of abortion.
Yet past failures are no guarantee of future losses. It is still worth assessing the favorable ground Republicans now occupy, almost entirely in spite of themselves.
At the close of 2023, Biden trailed the top three Republican presidential candidates in the national RealClearPolitics polling average. Several statewide surveys show the battleground states swinging back to the Republicans to a degree unseen in even 2016, when the blue wall collapsed on Hillary Clinton’s White House ambitions.
Biden’s job approval rating averages a tick above 40%, putting him underwater by more than 15 points. On specific issues, Biden’s numbers are even worse. Nearly 60% of voters disapprove of his performance on the economy, according to RealClearPolitics, while 39.7% approve. Just 32.4% approve of how he has handled inflation, even as rates continue to tumble from their 41-year high.
Similarly, 32% approve of how Biden has managed immigration and the border. Unsurprisingly, his disapproval stands at 62%. Foreign policy is a liability, with 35% approving and 60.3% disapproving. Biden is 20 points underwater on crime, with 57% disapproving.
These are among the top areas on which the 2024 election is likely to be decided. Some of them have been a drag on Biden for almost the entirety of his term, even as the White House works overtime to change the narrative on all of them.
As of mid-December, nearly 68% believed the country was on the wrong track to 24.6% who thought it was moving in the right direction. It’s true that this isn’t always predictive of how incumbents will perform in an election. But it is a sign of general pessimism and a major headwind for anyone pushing optimism, as sitting officeholders defending their records are often wont to do.
The map for the Senate, under Democratic control by a small margin, is highly favorable to Republicans. Democrats are defending seats in states likely to vote Republican for president no matter who the nominee is and regardless of whether Biden wins nationwide.
West Virginia went for former President Donald Trump by about 40 points in both 2016 and 2020, for example. The same can be expected this coming November, if he is the nominee. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) isn’t running for reelection to his seat. But Gov. Jim Justice (R-WV), the national GOP’s top Senate recruit in the state, is a candidate for it.
Montana will be more difficult, with Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) polling better. But Republicans have managed to entice businessman Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and their preferred Senate candidate, into the race. Republicans have carried the state in every presidential election since 1992, and a Democratic White House nominee hasn’t won a majority there.
Even some of the longer shots point to the challenges ahead for Democrats. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has won all three of his terms under favorable conditions. Both 2006 and 2018, the years he was elected to his first and third terms, were Democratic wave elections. In 2012, Brown was reelected while then-President Barack Obama was beating Mitt Romney in the Buckeye State. Trump carried Ohio twice with relative ease.
Not every race will be easy. Kari Lake, one of the GOP’s disappointments from 2022 after losing Arizona’s gubernatorial race, is running for the state’s Senate seat. Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-PA) is a big name. Republicans in both contests may need to demonstrate their viability to attract big national money.
In all, Democrats are defending more than twice as many Senate seats as Republicans. The GOP needs a net gain of two to win back the majority, a number that drops to one with the election of a Republican vice president.
The House is more difficult terrain because the Republicans have a small majority and are defending more seats in districts won by Biden in 2020. The GOP in the lower chamber has been beset by intraparty feuds, toppling one House speaker and taking weeks to elect a second.
Whether House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) can avoid the fate that befell his predecessor, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), as he seeks to avert government shutdowns without alienating conservatives remains to be seen. Forces loyal to McCarthy and dissidents such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who led the push for McCarthy’s removal, will keep doing battle in this year’s GOP primaries.
There will also be the matter of Biden’s impeachment. Many House Republicans want to see an inquiry into the president’s business dealings with his troubled son Hunter, who now faces multiple federal indictments. Some swing district Republicans are less enthused, and the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton hurt Republicans in the 1998 elections, though the GOP was able to run successfully on restoring dignity and honor to the White House two years later.
Still, with incumbent reelection rates in excess of 90%, the House Republican majority cannot be counted out. If Biden remains weak, Republicans will win back some of the swing districts at the presidential level. The GOP held its House majority for eight additional years after the Clinton impeachment, until the Iraq War was at its nadir. House Republicans even survived multiple government shutdowns.
Biden and the Democrats could yet face the comeuppance that eluded them in the midterm elections, perhaps even because the electorate did penalize them in a nonpresidential year as they famously did under Clinton and Obama.
The course correction that came after Clinton saw his party lose control of Congress in 1994 and the strategic choices made by Obama’s team to win reelection after the 2010 Democratic “shellacking” have mostly been avoided by the status quo ante Biden White House.
This time, Biden himself will be on the ballot. He is broadly unpopular. Most Democrats, especially those aged 30 and under, do not want him to be the party’s nominee. The economy could yet improve, but his age will not. Biden finds him squarely in the middle of Democratic internal divisions on Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, alienating Muslim and Arab American voters who could hold the key to battleground states such as Michigan.
The very unpopularity of a Biden-Trump rematch threatens to lead to a plethora of third-party challenges, with the potential for a highest percentage of the vote being won by a candidate other than the Democratic or Republican nominee since Ross Perot in 1992.
Such a candidacy or candidacies can have an unpredictable effect on the general election. Political scientists disagree more than 30 years later about which party Perot hurt more in 1992, with some exit polling suggesting that he siphoned votes equally from both. (Though Democrats surely wouldn’t have won Montana, for example, that year without Perot on the ballot.)
But we do know that much smaller third-party candidacies helped Trump eke out industrial swing-state pluralities in 2016, and their relative absence in 2020 made it easier for Biden to win them back. Many of the candidates in the running already or pondering such bids come from the Left and center, though Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could pull some from Trump’s base.
Shifting 2024 back to a race in which Biden comes in second among the voters who dislike the major-party presidential nominees could be a prescription for losing. He is generally believed to have beaten Trump among these voters in 2020.
Trump’s continued viability as a general election candidate is a good illustration of both the opportunities and risks ahead for Republicans. The fact is that based on current polling, the primary Democratic strategy for mitigating midterm election losses — making the campaign a binary choice against “MAGA Republicans” in the mold of Trump — does not guarantee Biden’s reelection.
After more than eight years of controversies, now including two impeachments, the 2020 election loss, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and four indictments across multiple jurisdictions, Trump is beating the Democrats in more polls than he did in either of the last two presidential elections.
"Trump is not only in a historically strong position for a nonincumbent to win the Republican nomination, but he is in a better position to win the general election than at any point during the 2020 cycle and almost at any point during the 2016 cycle," CNN elections analyst Harry Enten wrote in July 2023, later adding, "Trump never led in a single national poll that met CNN's standards for publication for the entirety of the 2020 campaign.”
Since then, Trump’s fortunes have only improved. And it is worth noting that some of Trump’s polling leads hold up against other Democrats besides Biden, including Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Vice President Kamala Harris. A mid-December YouGov-Yahoo News poll showed the former president up 3 points nationally over Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI).
At the same time, Trump carries enormous risks as a nominee for November. Compared to other top-tier Republican candidates, the 77-year-old draws less of a contrast with the octogenarian Biden’s age. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is hitting both Trump and Biden on age in her ads at the same time. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is even younger than Haley.
Then there is the question of whether the general electorate will remain as forgiving of Trump’s dire legal situation as Republican primary voters have been since the indictments began last year. There is polling that suggests independent as well as Democratic voters are less likely to see the various cases against him as election interference, or otherwise see them as wholly unjustified. A single conviction, then, could shift the contours of the race.
Every Trump advantage comes with a possible downside. For example, a New York Times-Siena College poll found Trump with a 22-point lead among voters who did not vote in 2020. This suggests the former president could actually benefit from a high-turnout election this year, turning the conventional wisdom on its head.
At the same time, Trump has remained highly resistant to GOP efforts to goose turnout among low-propensity voters. He regards most such initiatives as harmful to ballot integrity and has consistently blamed them for his loss to Biden during the pandemic.
When Trump won the 2016 presidential election, he had the element of surprise. This time, not only do Democrats know that he was elected president once before, but they are aware of countless polls showing him leading or within striking distance, months before the Democratic National Convention and ahead of the first votes being cast by voters in either party.
That Biden is possibly weak enough to lose to Trump, whose own favorability ratings are low, has ramifications for other Republicans who could yet win their party’s presidential nomination. But Democrats have considerable lead time to strategize and adjust accordingly.
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Whether Democrats will take advantage of their own opportunities is an open question. Some Democratic operatives believe the polls are “skewed” against their party for a change. Others look at the results from the past two years and think Republicans do well in the polls while Democrats win the real elections.
Republicans are nevertheless correct to begin the year with some hope. There will be 11 months to decide whether it will end in disappointment.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.