Is Biden the right choice for 2024?

Yes, but he's still a risky proposition

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Can Joe Biden win in 2024? It’s an important question because it has immediate consequences. Now that the president has announced the start of his re-election campaign, the Democratic Party has to decide whether to line up behind him or try to block him from running another campaign. For now they’re overwhelmingly opting for the former. There are a few novelty primary candidacies like Marianne Williamson and Robert Kennedy Jr., but no-one serious has stuck their head above the parapet and Bernie Sanders has even ruled himself out - although it’s not impossible to imagine that Biden might suffer a severe setback and someone more else might jump into the primary later on.

My view is that absent Biden having a serious health scare, this would almost definitely be a bad idea. Biden is a somewhat flawed candidate, and there’s a good chance he might lose to either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis in 2024. But a divisive primary is unlikely to produce a better candidate, and putting the country through one will make a Republican victory even more likely. In my view Biden has been a great president, but I don’t think any Democrats should be doing victory laps about a Trump vs. Biden match-up already. Nevertheless, in the real world it’s the best shot the party has at victory.

Biden’s strengths and weaknesses

If you want to understand Biden’s chances in 2024, the best starting point is to understand what happened in 2020. And what happened in 2020 is that Biden eked out a very narrow victory in the Electoral College due to his opponent’s massive flaws. Biden was more popular than Hillary Clinton had been in 2016 and he won about 3% more of the popular vote than she did, but he won the key swing states only by much smaller margins. Trump didn’t suffer a catastrophic collapse in his support despite low approval ratings, his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, and the state of the economy. Biden did just enough to edge him out, but it wasn’t a blowout.

John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch and Lynn Vavreck have explained this through the ideas of “calcification” and “party parity”. Calcification refers to the fact that partisanship has become such a strong force in modern American politics that the overwhelming majority of people - and states - vote the same way in each presidential election. Party parity refers to the fact that these calcified factions on the left and the right are of roughly equal size. Put these two things together and you have a situation in which each party can count on having large and basically equal chunks of support already baked-in, and elections get decided by the very small slice of genuine swing voters who actually change their minds between elections.

These forces are one way to understand why Trump’s level of support shocked so many people in both 2016 and 2020. Despite all the things that make him relatively unique among modern major-party candidates - the racism, the tweeting, the erratic behavior - the power of calcification placed a limit on how low his support could go. Trump actually won 0.7% more of the popular vote in 2020 than he did in 2016 - he became slightly more popular, and Biden only won by managing to increase the popularity of the Democrats even more. He did that by drawing a contrast between himself and Trump which persuaded enough voters at the margins that booting Trump out would be good for the country.

This is both good news and bad news for Joe Biden in 2024. The bad news is that in 2020, Biden benefited from the negative spectacle that Trump was making as president while himself being something of an unknown quantity. Sure, Biden had great name recognition, but how he might actually perform as president was still an open question. That has now been revealed, and many voters don’t like what they see. Biden started off with an approval rating of 53%, but it’s now under 43%. That’s a significant decline which would be seriously worrying to Biden if he were running against a very popular opponent.

The good news is that he isn’t. Presidential elections aren’t referendums on individuals; they’re about the comparison and contrast between two candidates. And there is a lot of evidence that when given a choice between Biden and Trump, voters still narrowly favor Biden. A recent poll found that almost half of voters who disapprove of how both Trump and Biden have performed as president nevertheless prefer Biden. The memory of the Trump presidency is hardly going to leave people’s minds between now and next year, especially when Trump is still embroiled in all sorts of scandals and legal troubles even when he’s out of office.

That might provide just enough wiggle room for Biden to eventually eke out another win, but it’s not a slam-dunk. A significant additional decline in Biden’s approval ratings or in the economic situation might cause just enough voters to decide to stay home or to give Trump another chance. If only 44,000 voters had done that in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin in 2020, Biden would have tied with Trump in the Electoral College rather than winning. Calcification means Biden’s numbers probably won’t get much lower, but they don’t have to for him to be in trouble.

If Biden’s opponent isn’t Trump, then the situation becomes more perilous. I’ve written at length about why I think DeSantis is a deeply flawed candidate who is likely to lose his primary against Trump, but if he were to win then I think he would be a more fearsome opponent for Biden in the general election. DeSantis’ flaws would not magically go away just because he won the primary, but there’s every reason to think he would benefit from the political trends I’ve described above. Calcification and party parity mean he only needs to perform so-so against an unpopular incumbent overseeing a troubled economy in order to win. And whatever else can be said about him, he definitely has less baggage than Trump.

Primary-ing Biden would be a bad idea

Just because a candidate has weaknesses doesn’t mean that running a divisive primary will produce someone stronger.

One of the mistakes that people often make when they think about politics is that they mix up the questions of “how popular is X?” and “how popular will X be after our opponents drop two hundred million dollars of negative ads on it?” Divisive primaries in particular have been shown to reduce the popularity of candidates once they reach the general election. One study of primaries in U.S. House and Senate races found that if they receive a great deal of media coverage, they lower the candidate’s performance in the general election by 6% on average. They do this by exposing the public to an extensive discussion of the candidate’s flaws and large quantities of television advertising designed to cast the candidate in a negative light.

This was one of the big critiques that many people (myself included) had of Bernie Sanders in 2016. He continued his primary way after it became obvious that he couldn’t beat Hillary Clinton, and doing that just meant more days and weeks of attacks on Hillary Clinton when the whole party could have been trying to focus on attacking Donald Trump. I don’t know if 2016 would have turned out different if Sanders had dropped out sooner - although I’ve certainly made that argument after a few beers - but him not doing so certainly didn’t help.

The same dynamic counsels against anyone primary-ing Biden today. Because the benefits of incumbency are high and because there is no obvious strong other candidate, the chances are that Biden would win a serious primary. But he would emerge from it diminished, distracted, and probably with the old liberal vs. progressive wounds of 2016 reopened. Running a serious primary would also do a lot to distract Biden from actually governing throughout much of 2024, which not only increases the odds of some disaster occurring which would hurt the Democrats in the general, but also means the public would spend the best part of a year seeing him as a candidate, not a president. That diminishes the aura of the office and the power of incumbency.

And what if he were to actually lose? If the Democrats go into the general led by Pete Buttigieg or Elizabeth Warren, then we’re stepping into the unknown. Only once before has an incumbent president decided to step down in the face of a primary challenge. In 1968, Eugene McCarthy’s strong campaign against Lyndon Johnson contributed to Johnson’s decision to step down rather than contest the election. Hubert Humphrey ended up being the Democratic nominee. But he never managed to disassociate himself from the unpopular policies of the Johnson administration, and the Democratic Party was badly divided by the contentious primary. Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon in the general.

The odds that some candidate other than Joe Biden could emerge victorious from a divisive primary, reunite the Democratic Party, and cruise to victory seem extremely slim. Far too many things could go wrong along the away, and whoever did run would be losing the chances of incumbency. Not many voters get extremely excited about Biden. But the evidence shows that after seeing what sort of president he is and weighing it against the sort of president that Donald Trump was, they prefer Biden. Throwing that advantage out of the window and taking a chance on some other contrast - Warren v. Trump, Harris v. Trump - is too much of a risk.

So Biden is going to roll on. As you can tell from this post, I’m a little nervous about that. Over-confidence and under-estimating Donald Trump were two key reasons why Democrats lost in 2016. But Biden has proven his sceptics wrong on two occasions now - in 2020 and in the 2022 midterms - and there’s a good chance he might do it again. I’m not usually a glass half full kind of guy, but in this case Biden has convinced me to be one. I especially like how the campaign has changed its messaging from 2020, which will be the subject of a future post.