Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) speaks to reporters on July 20, 2023. Brown is up for re-election in 2024 in a race that may determine control of the Senate.
As we approach the 2024 election, the Democrats’ situation is surreal. They have passed landmark legislation, and by almost any measure Biden has been a successful president. He will likely face a thuggish, felonious opponent in Donald Trump, who ought to be unelectable.
Yet Joe Biden’s approval ratings, though up slightly since last spring, are still net negative. And in match-ups against Trump, polls suggest, incredibly, that the two are running almost even.
It’s clear that Biden’s age is a big part of the problem. It isn’t just that he will be 81 on Election Day (and 82 when and if he begins a second term). He looks old, his voice is often weak and reedy, and he makes forgetful blunders in off-the-cuff remarks that suggest an elderly person whose cognition is beginning to slip.
Moreover, Biden is less than stellar as a messenger. If you look at the White House talking points on Biden’s many achievements, they often read better than Biden sounds.
The problem isn’t Biden’s age per se. Let’s recall that one of the most effective champions and motivators of young voters is another old guy: Bernie Sanders.
I have been in countless conversations with serious people who say that they wish Biden had decided to pack it in after one surprisingly successful term and let a younger candidate be the standard-bearer in 2024. I’ve written as much myself.
But barring some kind of health emergency, this is not going to happen. Biden will be the candidate. And so Democrats have no choice but to maximize enthusiasm for Biden while compensating for his weaknesses in other ways.
A related problem is that Biden’s achievements, though impressive, are less than transformative, with the benefits mostly in the future. Large-scale student debt cancellation might have been transformative, but it was blocked by the Supreme Court. A generous refundable tax credit, really a child allowance for parents, was transformative, but it was killed after one year by Republicans and faithless Democrats (read: Joe Manchin). Drug price controls are potentially transformative, but their impact is delayed and watered down by the terms of legislative compromise.
Abortion will be a galvanizing issue in 2024, and it will boost turnout where it is most urgently needed for the Democrats, particularly among young voters.
Biden’s industrial-policy outlays are superb and long overdue. But they will not generate large numbers of jobs until well after the 2024 election. The typical working-class or young voter, who can’t afford to buy a house, or who is saddled with student debt, or who can’t find a good payroll job with good benefits, simply cannot point to dramatic improvement in their lives courtesy of Democratic programs. Compare Biden with FDR and you immediately see the difference. And as pollster Stan Greenberg keeps pointing out, bragging about program accomplishments when people don’t see much difference in their own situations makes a leader less credible, not more.
One more challenge is that much of the working-class defection from the Democrats is about cultural issues. As one who has long argued that Democrats need to emphasize pocketbook issues, I have to admit that economics can take you only so far when the prime motivator is the belief that liberals are soft on illegal immigrants, obsessed with bathroom rights, willing to kill unborn babies, care more about criminals than victims, and give unjustified preferences to minorities.
So what to do?
The smartest politicians and strategists whom I’ve spoken with make the following points.
Biden and the Democrats can benefit from reverse coattails. The conventional wisdom is that the presidential candidate has the coattails, the ability to excite voters and help down-ballot candidates of the president’s party. Conversely, down-ticket candidates can’t affect turnout very much. Well, none of that is the case this time.
Several senators up in 2024 are, to be blunt, more popular than Biden and are better politicians. Sherrod Brown will probably run well ahead of Biden in Ohio. Likewise Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. In Arizona, Ruben Gallego will pull lots of progressive voters to the polls. He’s a lot more exciting than Biden.
Ohio is probably beyond Biden’s reach in 2024, but Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona are prime swing states. Effective candidates for the Senate and House can mobilize voters and in turn help the national ticket. Yes, it’s possible to imagine voters splitting their tickets to vote for, say, Tammy Baldwin and Donald Trump, but precious few of them.
The 2018 midterm election was the epic example of down-ticket races energizing voters to the Democrats’ advantage, and of course no presidential candidate was on the ballot. If Democrats and grassroots activists do their jobs well, 2024 could be like 2018.
State achievements can increase turnout and boost support for the national party. Minnesota Democrats ran the table in the legislative session just ended. With a narrow trifecta in the House and Senate and an effective governor in Tim Walz, they stayed unified and passed more than a dozen landmark bills, including a large refundable child tax credit (estimated to cut child poverty by a third), 20 weeks of universal paid family and medical leave, free school lunches for all schoolchildren, codified abortion rights, and free public college for all families with incomes under $80,000 a year. Democrats found the money to pay for all this by taxing the rich.
“There is not a single family that will not benefit,” says state Democratic Party Chair Ken Martin, a protégé of the late senator Paul Wellstone. Practical benefits such as these can cause even cultural conservatives to give Democrats a second look.
While Minnesota is probably already in the Democratic column, the critical swing state of Michigan also had a solid legislative session and is looking to do more, which could trigger Democratic support.
Democrats gained their legislative majority in Minnesota in 2022, says Martin, by picking up some rural seats that were thought to be unwinnable. Martin sums up his strategy for getting out the message that Democrats care about regular people. “You need to contest every race, even in places where you are not likely to win. You need a candidate and an organization on the ground. That gives you a built-in listening and messaging machine that is far more effective than TV spots or social media.”
Running local candidates can boost national turnout for Democrats. Yoni Landau, a respected grassroots strategist who founded the group Contest Every Race, points out that there are hundreds of thousands of down-ballot elected posts at the county and town level that Democrats fail to contest. Simply fielding candidates raises national Democratic turnout.
In 2021, the group Run For Something did a detailed statistical analysis comparing turnout in local legislative races where the Democrats fielded a candidate with those where the Republican ran unopposed. They found that even in deep-red states and districts where the Democrat lost, having a Democrat in the race helped the national ticket. In Georgia, the fact that more Democrats contested local elections may well have helped Biden eke out his 12,000-vote victory margin.
According to the study, Biden did 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent better in conservative legislative districts where Democrats ran challengers than in districts where the Republican was unopposed. The analysis used precinct-level data in eight states—Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Kansas, and New York—to compare contested and uncontested races.
Culture can be turned around on Republicans. Abortion is the ultimate culture-war issue, and it is backfiring on Republicans. In every case, whether progressives or conservatives have put an abortion initiative directly before the voters (whether to ban abortion or to guarantee abortion rights), progressives have won and Republicans have been shown to be at odds with majority public sentiment. As libertarians, conservatives resent government messing with their bodies, and that goes for right-wing governments.
Abortion will be a galvanizing issue in 2024, and it will boost turnout where it is most urgently needed for the Democrats, particularly among young voters, who tend to be less than wild about Joe Biden. But most voters who come to polling places to vote for abortion rights will stay to vote for Biden.
Double down on pocketbook populism. Biden was at his finest when he attacked the pharmaceutical industry by name in the course of releasing the initial list of prescription drugs subject to price controls. “Today is the start of a new deal for patients where Big Pharma doesn’t just get a blank check at your expense,” Biden declared at the White House event.
He could be doing the same in calling out other monopolies. Populism is popular.
It’s all about turnout. At both the level of the presidential election as well as control of the House and Senate, 2024 will depend heavily on turnout. Heavy voting from one party or the other can outstrip the effects of the relative handful of swing voters who will actually consider voting for either one. Which way elections swing may come down to which party is more motivated.
The question is which party does a better job of galvanizing its base and potential base. The Trump base will turn out, but it is not close to a national majority. The potential Democratic vote is much larger. Biden is not a galvanizing candidate, but there are other ways of assuring that Democrats, progressives, and above all young voters are mobilized. Democrats will need to use all of them.
