2024: Same as it ever was
“I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change?'"
Human instinct is to obsess over what’s different.
What’s dissimilar helps constitute most “news.”
Conversations with friends and colleagues rarely dwell on rehashing gaps in past interactions. They skew comfortably toward recency. “What’s new” is the default starting point. “What are you doing this weekend … this summer … working on this quarter.”
Journalists (ignobly) employ the all-caps ‘NEW’ so often in social media posts that the word’s potency risks atrophy.
Yet undoubtedly it’s the uncommon, the unheard of and the unprecedented that springs interest, whether it be in the form of excitement, fear or escape from life’s mundanity.
The French fashion designer Coco Chanel proclaimed that “in order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.”
Achieving differentiation is the vector for change. Change is what makes elections consequential.
Jeff Bezos once remarked that one of the most common questions he’s asked is what’s going to change in the next ten years.
“I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next ten years?,’” Bezos remarked, before delivering the hook. “And I submit to you that that … is actually … more important.”
What won’t change.
It is this axiom – that knowing what’s consistent is more useful than obsessing over what’s different – that has reframed the way I’m staring at the 2024 presidential campaign – a campaign that feels totemic of deja vu.
What’s different from 2020 is the candidate inhabiting incumbency, the challenger standing as a single-termed non-incumbent former president, and a criminal trial that could render that former president a convicted felon by summer.
But the guts of 2024, the factors and questions that will determine its ultimate outcome, are relatively stable.
Through the kaleidoscope of storylines of the past six months – the wars, the protests, the vacillations in the economy, the GOP speakership drama, the millions of Biden campaign ad dollars – Donald Trump still leads in five of the six battleground states polled by The New York Times and Siena College.
Same as it ever was.
“We have probably over-complicated politics a lot over the last several years,” said former Obama official Dan Pfeifer on Pod Save America this week, as a way of explaining Biden’s stubborn polling deficit to Donald Trump.
Let’s simplify the 10 basic truths of the 2024 re-match that aren’t all that different from 2020, 2022 and even other past cycles.
The 2024 election will be decided by 150,000 to 300,000 voters in six states. Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are Biden’s best path to 270 EVs. Arizona and Georgia are gravy and reverting to Republican form, leaving Nevada as the pivotal electoral college battleground that will (again) unnerve Democrats and could sink the president.
Biden will likely earn fewer electoral votes than he did in 2020, just as Trump declined from 2016 to 2020 and Obama slid between 2008 and 2012. American presidents are in an era of permanent unpopularity.
Democratic political consultant Bradley Tusk punctuates the point >
“Anyone running for office has to promise to fix everyone's problem and then given the flaws in the system, they mainly can't, so they get blamed for failing. And because anything in the past seems better than the present, Trump's term feels better than it was and Biden's feels worse than it is. So that results in an anti-incumbency bias that could lead to a string of one term presidents.”
In the ensuing six to eight weeks, a considerable amount of time will be devoted to parsing and analyzing the impact of Trump’s VEEP pick. It’ll mean