JV Last made an excellent point about the upcoming presidential election:
The 2024 election has no modern precedent and this unprecedented difference (1) Is not properly appreciated, and (2) Explains why the race has been so stable.
This thing is so obvious that you’re going to dismiss it out of hand. But I want you to work through it with me:
No one living has seen an election in which two presidents have run against one another.
And that changes everything. Let me explain.
What is the fundamental hurdle that every presidential candidate has to overcome? When the voter looks at the candidate, she asks, Can he do the job?
That’s it. That’s the big question. And the answer is binary: Voters have to imagine each candidate as the chief executive and decide either, Yes, this person is a plausible president, or No, this person is not up to the office.
One of the (many) advantages an incumbent president has is that he has proven that he can do the job.
This sword has two edges: An incumbent’s presidential record can be attacked. Some voters may like it. Some may not. But at the lizard-brain level, they have all seen him sitting at the big desk in the Oval. They know what he looks like as president.
An insurgent candidate has advantages, too. But having to clear the bar of being plausibly presidential is the biggest and most fundamental disadvantage any insurgent faces. If a candidate can’t do that, then nothing else he has going in his favor matters.
At the risk of stating the obvious: Joe Biden is president of the United States. Donald Trump used to be president of the United States.
Whatever you think of either of them, they have both passed the plausibility test. No voter in 2024 has to imagine whether or not Biden or Trump can “do the job.”
How rare is this? The last time—the only time—it happened was in 1892 when President Grover Cleveland and former president Benjamin Harrison ran it back from the 1888 campaign, in which the insurgent (Cleveland) defeated a sitting president (Harrison).
Trump actually gets the best of both worlds: He has passed the presidential test—Republican voters have seen him presidenting.
But he’s also the insurgent candidate, because the Republican establishment hates him and is desperate for him to lose.
Correlation is not causation, but it’s not bupkis, either.
Add this structural advantage—being both the incumbent and the insurgent—to all of Trump’s other advantages (his online troll army, owning a social platform, his massive small-dollar donor list) and it’s clear that what people should have been asking themselves in 2021 wasn’t,
How could Trump win the nomination in 2024?
But rather,
How could Trump not win the nomination in 2024?
Why did they fail to understand the power of running as a former president?
Probably because no one living has seen it happen before.
What could happen to change the long-running dynamic in the primary?
There are answers to this question, but they are low-probability events:
-Trump could get tired of running and start phoning it in.
-Ron DeSantis could get good at politics.
-GOP voters could start caring about Trump’s alleged crimes.
Of those, only the first was ever a strong possibility. Trump seems to have overcome his initial lethargy and found purpose in his campaign. Say what you will about the guy, but he’s answered the bell.
Whit Ayres’s second guidestar is that the 2024 race will be fundamentally unstable because voters say they don’t want either Biden or Trump.
In general, I believe that we are in a chaotic era of politics. And you can see how the race could get reshuffled by external events.
But voters always say they don’t like the choices in front of them—just as they always say that they don’t want their incumbent president to run for re-election.
That’s because voters are
stupidirrationalinconsistent. I do not take their expressed feelings about hypotheticals at face value.
What I do take at face value: Campaigns are about information and uncertainty.
In the classic re-election campaign, the incumbent president is the known quantity who offers stability and low risk. We have a lot of information and only a little uncertainty about the president. Voters know what they are getting, for good and for ill.
The challenger must offer enough information about himself to clear the “presidential” threshold—but keep the details fuzzy enough that voters can project their own preferences onto him. He is the high-risk, high-upside choice. And the more he tries to hedge against the risk (by giving more information to voters), the lower his upside becomes (because he ceases to be a useful cipher).
The volatility you get in presidential elections stems from this information asymmetry as voters weigh what they know about the incumbent against what they think they are learning about the challenger.
[…]
If Biden and Trump are the nominees in 2024, then we will have total informational symmetry. Everyone will know everything about both of them—all they way down to how they have actually performed as president.
Ask yourself this: How could anyone be undecided between Biden and Trump?
There is no uncertainty. No race to define the candidates. We have perfect information about both of them.
And it isn’t a low-contrast choice—the two men represent very different kinds of presidenting.
All of which is why I would expect a Biden-Trump rematch to be fairly stable and low-variance—even if on the surface it seems chaotic.
I agree with this 100%. The race has been stable since November 8th 2020. The only thing that could have changed it would have been if either Biden or Trump had decided not to run or had kicked the bucket. Other than that, we have been in a state of suspended animation this entire time, waiting for the rematch.
I would just add that one of the dynamics that defines this unprecedented race is the fact that Trump has a rabid cult of personality that’s highly motivated and the other side is equally motivated to stop him. As I have said many times — it’s going to be hand to hand combat. (Metaphorically I hope!)