2024 Presidential Election Redux

We’ve just had our first presidential debate between Biden and Trump, both Biden and Trump have secured the delegates needed for their party’s nomination. So, where does the race stand right now?

Debate Performance

Last night’s first presidential debate aired on CNN last night. I was agreed on between the campaigns with CNN for June 27th and ABC News in September. They entirely cut out the Commission on Presidential debates. I will say plainly, the debate was hard to watch. Neither candidate could stay on topic, but Biden was visually worse and his lost his thoughts many times. Reading Twitter last night, it was a bloodbath for Democrats. Some people kept up their support, but there were many loud voices begging for Biden to step down.

It seems like the Democratic Party is in crisis in the hours after the debate. Biden needed to show up and show out for his agenda and his party and he spent an hour and a half bumbling through answers. While Trump couldn’t stay on topic to save his life, he looked better, simple as. Biden also ended up being far more defensive than I think he planned. He did get in some good jabs at Trump, but that’s not the social media narrative.

I spent last night reading Twitter and talking to people on the phone and none of my liberal friends are happy, meanwhile the Trump supporters are cheering. Depending on how you lean politically probably determines how you feel about the debate last night.

Democratic Headwinds

However, Biden’s debate performance isn’t the only Democratic Party headwind. There are also some changes attitudes among voters as well. Nate Cohn in the weekly The Tilt newsletter from the New York Times reported that, “Newly registered voters, who are disproportionately young and nonwhite, have tended to lean Democratic. That’s been less and less true during the Biden era. A majority of states ask people to select a party affiliation when they register, and last year newly registered Democrats made up only about 53 percent of those who chose a major party — beating Republican sign-ups by a narrow margin of 26 percent to 23 percent of total registrations — according to data from L2, a nonpartisan voter data vendor.”

Does that mean public opinion is shifting away from Democrats? Nate continues, “The tepid Democratic numbers among new registrants are a small but surprising part of Donald J. Trump’s narrow early lead in the polls. Taking the last two national New York Times/Siena College polls together, President Biden leads by less than a percentage point among voters who say they voted in 2020, but he trails by 23 points among those who say they didn’t vote in 2020 — and about a third of those nonvoters are new registrants, who aren’t offering Democrats their usual support.”

Another headwind faced by Democrats right now, is the simple fact that Americans are unhappy with the economy. This always spells disaster for Presidential campaigns. Presidents who try to win office on poor economics tend not to be successful. George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter both lost due to a bad economy. I remarked that Biden was the answer to the question, “What if Jimmy Carter won in 1980?” However, it appears that history is about to rhyme again if the Biden campaign can’t get it together.

Conventions and Campaigns

In the upcoming weeks, both parties will hold their party conventions to officially nominate their candidates. The Republicans will be in Milwaukee and the Democrats will be in Chicago. The debate last night was supposed to be a kick-off for the summer campaign season. Trump still has a difficult path to 270, he needs to repeat his 2016 performance in order to win realistically. For Trump, he still has several legal challenges to deal with and is slowly gaining more cash. The Biden campaign has plenty of cash, but they need to defend several battleground states and convince swing voters that Biden is up to the job.

At this point, Biden can keep talking policy, but he needs to counter-act this narrative that he isn’t up to the job and that is now his challenge during the summer campaign season thanks to his recent debate performance. It is a long time to November. Much can happen, however, narratives do matter and the current narrative is putting Biden on the back foot, a place nobody wants to be.