2024 will be the largest election year in history. For the first time ever, nations consisting of over four billion people will participate in elections – including eight of the ten most populous countries and the three largest democracies: India, the European Union, and the United States. This is inspiring, but it comes in the wake of a recent struggle for liberal and electoral democracies, whose march – once buoyed by the postwar and post-USSR expansion of liberties over the course of most of the last 80 years – has become stagnant, or even diminished, in the last decade. Democratic backsliding has strengthened its grip in much of the free world as a result of increased tolerance for political violence, the failures of nation building, an overall lapse in trust of core institutions, and citizen disengagement. In general, we at The Postrider attempt to eschew the easy takes, even if writing about discontent is easy – we try to ground it in reality. And, we pretty exclusively cover American elections, which – while not the largest election this year in terms of sheer numbers – will incontrovertibly be the most important in the course of the globe for the next four years.

We’ll have a lot to say in the year to come. Our Senate and presidential ratings will be back – we’re hoping with some additional features! – and we’ll have a fair share of complementary content to boot, but we’re now within a year from November 2024. As everything comes together, we’re wondering: what can we say right now that frames how we’re viewing the race that lies ahead?

By no means our official “rating,” and still much too early to effectively assess the state of many races, it is at least useful to think of where, once we do start to look into the state of the nation’s major elections, we can start. What are the fundamentals, factors, and elements that we can use to frame that starting point? This series of articles are written in that vein, to peer through the murkiness of early polls and commentary, looking at what actually will matter when we turn to the particulars of each race.

The House of Representatives | The Senate | The Presidency

You’ve waited, and you’ve waited patiently, and now we’re going to reward that with our very boring takes about the presidential race that just seem hot because everyone else likes to go for the quick takes.

No matter how hard Republicans tried – and we’ve been watching the whole way – Donald Trump is increasingly likely to be their presidential nominee for the third time in a row. Yes, the same Donald Trump who led an assault on the facilitation of the orderly transition of power in 2021, whose constant presence in our discourse caused Republicans to lose three national elections over six years, whose approval has always been and still is incredibly underwater, and who recently flubbed the easiest layup of a question I’ve ever seen – and now continues to double down on it. (Look, I have to get my gripes out of the way before the second Trump administration comes in and “go[es] after” all antagonistic members of the media, as a representative recently said it would do). No matter what anyone tells you, this is bad for Republicans. Yes, Trump has a passionate base who are motivated to turn out for him, and may even be able to successfully make appeals to some voter groups that many Republicans are not, but don’t kid yourself – Trump is a bad candidate. It takes a lot for an incumbent president to lose reelection, something that famously did happen to him. And Trump has more baggage, disdain, and bigger vulnerabilities than any other feasible Republican candidate. That’s not going to be a good thing for Republicans who seem keen to make Trump the center of their electoral world once more.

Look, you’re here for our seemingly countervailing take on the presidential election – that’s what I’m going to give you, because nothing has changed in our overall assessment. As we said back in April of 2022, President Biden is favored to win reelection. 

Let’s start with the polls. A lot of ink has been spilled (read: wasted) over individual polls this cycle, leading to Democrats panicking about nonsensical and individual polls. My personal favorite this year was the major early-November New York Times/Siena College poll which found Trump ahead by four-to-six points in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia; ten points in Nevada; and – the kicker – behind Biden by two points in Wisconsin. Note, first, that these are all states Biden won in 2020. The news billed this poll as showcasing “Trump ahead in 5/6 swing states,” but I challenge the accuracy of any poll that seriously suggests Biden is behind by ten points in Nevada (which should correlate much stronger with Arizona) but somehow up in Wisconsin (which you’d expect to correlate much more with Pennsylvania or Michigan). Spending any time on one specific poll at the national level is a waste of time, but boy did every outlet in the world love panicking about this one.

Getting my personal pet peeve of overemphasizing a single poll out of the way, I don’t want to ignore the lingering reality that – on average – Biden is struggling in head-to-head matchups. On average, Trump leads in national polls by about 2 points. But, because all that matters is how the six or seven swing states are leaning – and to be transparent with the fact that Trump is currently largely leading them too – let’s look at those as well: 

These are all averages, so they’re much more accurate, but they still paint a dire picture for the president on the surface. My eyebrow still perks up when I see Biden ahead in Wisconsin (a state which has consistently trended Republican in the “Trump era”) but behind by so much more in Nevada or Michigan, which are objectively bluer states. But I digress – the polls don’t look good for the president either way. A few things may be going on. For one, pollsters have certainly adjusted how and who they poll to fix some of their recent presidential election polling errors (they gave Biden an average national lead of around 10% in 2020, but he only won by 4.5%), so their sample populations may now skew a bit more conservative than expected. Biden’s recent polling underperformance with Black and Latino voters is damaging his averages in more diverse states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada. Americans’ perceived economic woes probably don’t help – maybe voters tagged Biden to higher inflation and he can’t shake that, even as it has now fallen significantly, GDP is robust, and unemployment is low; many Americans believe the country is going in the wrong direction and (falsely) believe the economy is in poor shape and perhaps blame the incumbent. This tracks with the fact that many similarly-positioned national leaders also poll poorly right now.

I’m skeptical that there’s a clear political takeaway from these factors. Concern over Biden’s age is not exactly new (nor did it doom him in 2020, when there was the same concern – if not as pervasive in the national discourse), he wasn’t exactly “young” when his polling was above-water in much of 2021. As was more aptly put by Andrew Prokop over at Vox, the age concern is probably more a signal of concern over Biden’s “competence.” I’m also very skeptical that a Biden alternative was ever viable (see, like, half the pieces I’ve written), in part because an incumbent president has inherent advantages to begin with, a competitive primary would have forsaken many if not all of the entrenched advantages remaining, and – though most people seem to ignore this – the data doesn’t bear it out! Polling averages give Trump a lead over Vice President Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders – often by several points more than he has against Biden (only Manchin and Whitmer match or slightly outperform Biden, but both are still behind Trump). This is not exactly a stirring endorsement for Biden, but it’s not as if there’s actually a better option.

We’ll come back to Biden in a second but let’s briefly turn to the other side of the contest: Trump. My earlier point concerning Trump’s many, many shortcomings and poor electoral record was not merely to hit a guy while he’s down – it raises a valid observation that many outlets seem to ignore: for all of 2023, Trump’s polling average in matchups against Biden has hovered between 42-47%. That is not meaningfully distinct from where it sat during all of 2020, and it remains a minority of those polled. If Trump really has support from 47% of voters, that leaves 53% of voters unaccounted for. Indeed, what seems to be throwing Trump the apparent polling advantage are Democrats and independents who are not supporting the president or Trump. At this point in 2011, Barack Obama polled at around 46% against Mitt Romney at 45%, 9% of voters were unaccounted for; in 2015, Hillary Clinton polled at around 46% against Trump at 42%, 12% of voters were unaccounted for. It’s going to matter where this gap of voters goes, and who is better positioned to win (or win back) those voters. 

The anti-Trump coalition turned out in the 2022 midterms and in the 2023 off-year elections – it seems clear there remains a compelling anti-Trump majority nationally, but a lot of these voters may not be explicitly sold on Biden either. He may have been the evident lesser of two evils in 2020, someone they felt no strong support for other than his opponent (in the parlance of some, Democrats are winning the “meh” voters). Those voters haven’t so much shifted towards Trump as they’ve shifted around Biden. If Trump becomes the Republican nominee and comes to dominate discourse, a lot of these voters will make the obvious calculus. This was the strategy successfully deployed by Democrats in the last two years’ elections: by tying candidates to Trump, against abortion rights, and against democracy (all things Republican candidates made fairly easy in those elections, mind you), the Democrats overperformed. I struggle to reason that the anti-Trump coalition truly sits out an election where Trump is on the ballot and now actively campaigning on being a dictator “only on day one.” There are a lot of voters who may come home to Biden – his ceiling is clearly higher than Trump’s – and you’d rather be in Biden’s position than Trump’s given that.

We’re not really ready to look at the race from a map perspective and state by state much more than we’ve done here, so we’ll avoid assessing the race in any of the individual swing states for now. That said, almost all of them have a Senate race where the Democrat is at least favored to win based on the state-level factors we do know. Extrapolating from what we’ve learned about elections in the last few years, that’s a decent proxy for the fact that voters in these swing states seem primed to support a generic Democrat over a Republican challenger. Given Joe Biden is practically the literal incarnation of the “generic Democrat,” (who, by the way, does beat Trump in head-to-head matchups), that should spur some cautious Democratic optimism.

Democrats shouldn’t rest on their laurels – a lot can happen between now and next November (in fact, Democrats should hope voters’ perception of the economy improves!) – but neither should Republicans, whose presumptive nominee faces several criminal trials next year, and may be primed to make some high profile and unpopular moves in 2024. At this point in 2019, Democrats were hurtling towards the first impeachment of then-President Trump and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first learned of a “cluster of 27 cases of pneumonia” in Wuhan, China. Though we cannot predict the unknown, we can say that, right now – given Biden’s higher potential ceiling, his incumbency advantage, the many afflictions of his opponent, the surprising strength of the anti-Trump coalition, and the year left in which to focus and refocus on the campaign and the candidates – we defiantly suggest Biden was astute to run again, and is at least favored to win reelection in 2024.