Oliver Contreras/Sipa USA via AP Images
The presidential motorcade waits for President Joe Biden to depart for the U.S. Capitol prior to his State of the Union address on February 7, 2023.
Since Biden’s triumphant State of the Union address, conversations among Democrats have gone in two directions:
(a) Wow, the old guy still has it. He brilliantly laid a trap for the Republicans. When they walked into it, he was even great at the ad-libs. Who knew? We were wrong that he shouldn’t run in 2024.
(b) It was one good day, with a short half-life. Biden is not getting any younger. The speech got high approval ratings, but Biden’s own ratings seem stuck underwater. Won’t someone please talk him out of running?
My heart is with (a), but my head is with (b).
Except that no senior Democratic pol is going to tell a successful president not to seek re-election. I have confirmed that with interviews.
So there are three possible ways to avert what could be a rout in 2024, and two of them involve Donald Trump.
First, Trump’s support has weakened but he can still win nomination if more Republican contenders get into the race and divide the anti-Trump vote. Republican primaries in most states still have either winner-take-all or a hybrid system. So in a fragmented field, Trump’s 30 percent is a sweep. (Go Mike Pence, go Nikki Haley.) And Trump is the one Republican whom Biden can readily beat.
Second, Trump loses the GOP nomination. Out of sheer spite, he runs as an independent. He has hinted at that. The Republican vote is split, and Biden wins handily, maybe takes 35 states.
Third, something persuades Biden (and first lady Jill Biden) that he should not run after all.
I would not bet the farm on any of these scenarios. And yet the farm is at risk. Biden may gain some ground for competence and sanity as House Republicans keep displaying the lunacy of their party. But they could also drag him down with them, as in the debt ceiling standoff.
The likely outcome is that an electable Republican like Ron DeSantis wins the nomination, and it’s trench warfare in 2024. All we can do is what Democrats did in 2020: Recognizing that Biden was not our first choice and recognizing the stakes, we go all out to elect him.
Oh, and he also needs sufficient coattails to win big and prevent a steal in a close election, and also bring in a Democratic Congress with him. Only that. Sheesh.
This will be my last item on election prognostication for a while. It is, as they say, a mug’s game.
So permit me a few words on other topics.
I’m delighted by the response to these On TAP newsletters that I write three times a week. It turns out to be a great format—shorter than a column, longer than a tweet. Subscribing to On TAP newsletters makes it easy to read our stuff. But this is not all that we at the Prospect do.
So I am taking the liberty of flagging a few other recent pieces that you might like. If you are not in the habit of checking out prospect.org, I urge you to do so.
In several pieces, I’ve been going after the Fed’s insane policy of trying to crush the economy even as inflation is clearly subsiding. Here’s one. And I follow what it will take to make Biden’s bold climate and “build America” programs actually succeed.
I also hope you follow the stunning work of our executive editor, David Dayen, among other great Prospect colleagues. Here is a characteristic Dayen tour de force on the rise of monopoly and efforts of Biden’s appointees to contain it.
I will be recommending other important pieces from time to time. Thanks for reading.
