The Last Hurrah: Why Joe Biden Should be Romping to Victory In the 2024 Election, But Isn’t

Greymantle has a confession to make: I really, really hate being wrong. Especially when it’s about something important, like a U.S. presidential election.

And yet, I have to admit, events keep proving me terribly wrong re: the tilt of the 2024 election practically every day. So much so, that Greymantle is going to eat a big slice of humble pie now, and revise his prediction for the 2024 U.S. presidential election for the second time in four weeks.

The last time was on June 11, when I revised my prediction for the election from a landslide for President Biden and the Democrats (a prediction that I made in December of 2022), to a squeaker election victory for Biden with down-ballot Democrats doing better and most likely re-taking the House of Reps. The June revision to my forecast was based on an analysis of the polling trends from December 2023 to June 2024, along with the Israel-Hamas War’s shredding of progressive support for President Biden.

Today’s revision to my forecast stems primarily from – you guessed it – Biden’s awful performance in his first televised debate versus Donald Trump on June 27 and the rising chorus of calls for Biden to withdraw from the race from mainstream and left-leaning media outlets, as well as from prominent elected Democrats and Democratic donors, the actor George Clooney being most notable.

And never mind the botched assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life on July 13. That is going to boost Trump’s chances against Biden even further, given that Trump now has the ‘sympathy vote’.

At this point, Greymantle doesn’t really think that it’s news to anyone that the president’s chance of re-election have plummeted since June 27. That Biden has maybe – maybe – a 35% to 40% chance of victory against Trump in the general election is pretty well understood.

That was my own view, as well, prior to Saturday’s events in Butler, Pennsylvania. My newly revised forecast for the election is that Trump is going to win it by around 250,000 votes in the swing states translating into roughly 296 electoral votes. He’ll lose the popular vote again by about 5 million. No surprises there. Trump’s chances of victory are now in the range of 65%, and maybe higher.

An excellent op-ed in the NY Times on July 12 penned by the long-time Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik spells out the math in the Electoral College clearly and succinctly. There is no need to belabor the reader with a long-winded regurgitation of more professional analyses of the electoral situation made by those better-placed to understand the operations of the American voting system.

What Greymantle would like to do instead is make some sense of all this…madness.

In this election, we have (1) a convicted criminal who tried to stay in power during his last stint in the Oval Office by overturning the 2020 election result, ultimately resorting to an attempt to cling to power through force, running against (2) a generally able president of the ‘old-school politician’ variety who is clearly showing signs of age-related decline. As one snarky poster put in in a comment written on The Dispatch website: “It’s a case of the criminal versus the corpse. I will take a corpse over a criminal”.

The problem is, an apparent majority of Americans are not on the same page as the snarky Dispatch poster. When confronted with “the corpse”, their aging President now in office, and a slightly younger, albeit more vigorous criminal, enough of them – at least in the swing states, but in growing numbers elsewhere, as well – seem more inclined to choose ‘the criminal’ over ‘the corpse’.

HOW DID IT COME TO THIS?

The United States is not in a great place. Economically speaking, we are doing better than almost every other world economy, with one of the lowest rates of unemployment, and inflation levels that are no worse than those of other developed economies, and lower than many.

But socially, in terms of levels of social trust and political amicability, we are at rock bottom. Conditions could only be worse if there were an actual, open civil war within the country. We’re not there – yet.

Greymantle has analyzed the reasons for America’s declining social trust and worsening political polarization in prior posts. Suffice it to say that Americans in different social groupings and regions of the country now occupy wildly distinct social and mental realities. It’s an issue that’s been discussed with sympathy and eloquence by a number of fine political commentators and social scientists, this idea of ‘bespoke realities‘.

In effect, bespoke realities are social bubbles, heavily enabled by Internet algorithms and social media, that allow people to live inside information silos that insulate them from new data or opposing views. If all you hear is your own point of view, reinforced by the people you socialize with, preferred news media you consume, and amplified by misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, the result is that there are simply no shared facts or assumptions that allow people to create common ground.

Common ground vanishes like fog in the hot sun. Even if real conditions are not that bad, as measured by GDP, employment numbers, new job creation, crime statistics and educational achievement, it just doesn’t matter…people will believe whatever they want to believe, or whatever their peers suggest or demand that they believe. Actual reality (always a complicated and shifty thing) be damned.

REASONS BIDEN SHOULD BE WINNING

Greymantle’s earlier predictions, particularly our December 2022 forecast for a Democratic landslide in the November 2024 general election, were based on a number of salient trends that were clear at the time, particularly after the 2022 midterm elections. These trends are worth a brief review.

First, the Democrats over-performed nearly all official forecasts in 2022. The ‘red wave’ never materialized. Trump-supported candidates like Blake Masters and Herschel Walker performed abysmally at the polls. These facts suggested growing support for Democratic issues.

Second, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 handed the Dems a major issue to campaign upon. The SCOTUS decision was broadly unpopular and aided the defeat of several Republican state and federal candidates. In state elections over the two years since June 2022, abortion rights have been an election winner – even in ‘red states’ such as Kansas and Ohio.

Third, the Biden Administration’s policy mix in its first two years included formulation of a new U.S. industrial policy and a shift back to pre-Reagan pro-labor positions that federal legislators and the judiciary had embraced between the 1930s and 1970s. These policy shifts addressed two of the core areas of discontent motivating Trump’s supporters, particularly in the Midwest. It seemed reasonable to believe that at least some of these Trump supporters could move back to the Democrats as the positive impact of these changes became manifest.

These trends favoring Biden and the Democrats appeared to strengthen during the course of 2023.

SPECIFIC BIDEN VICTORIES AND POSITIONS THAT SHOULD BE HELPING HIM, BUT AREN’T

1. Low U.S. unemployment. The unemployment rate has been below 4% since December 2021. This compares favorably with long-run averages in the 5.3% range.
2. Receding inflation. While core inflation remains above the 25-year average, it has come down considerably since peaking in June 2022. Monthly inflation is at a roughly 3.3% run rate.
3. Several years of solid personal income growth, particularly in 2021 and 2022.
4. The end of the COVID-19 pandemic and a return to normalcy, judged by a return to normal activities such as air travel, vacations, public events, and the removal of pandemic restrictions.
5. Maintenance of many Trump-era tariffs on Chinese and European goods. Enactment of these tariffs by Trump in 2017-19 was popular with Trump’s base and broad voter cross-sections.
6. Launch of arguably a more thought-out and successful industrial policy by the Biden administration compared to Trump’s policies, which were often ad hoc and reactive.
7. Passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) in November 2021. This bipartisan legislation has poured nearly $2 trillion into the U.S. economy and is effectively addressing decades of infrastructure neglect.
8. Passage of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in March 2021. The federal funds pumped into the economy by ARPA have boosted state tax collections and balance sheets, enabling them to accumulate cash and spend it on a variety of big state infrastructure projects.
9. Tougher posture on China compared to recent Democratic and Republican administrations (with the exception of Trump’s).
10. Strengthening of NATO and building a coalition of Western countries to support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion of the former.
11. The fact that the Russia-Ukraine War, and Biden’s support of Ukraine, has not resulted in a wider war in Europe or in armed U.S. clashes against Russian forces.
12. Steady support for Israel following Hamas’s instigation of hostilities in October 2023.
13. Biden’s strong support for U.S. labor unions and organizing since assuming office in Jan. 2021. His appointments to the National Labor Relations Board have been uniformly allies of labor.
14. Biden was the first U.S. president to rally in person with a labor union when he supported the UAW strike against the Big Three automakers in September 2023.
15. Consistent support for democratic norms and institutions.

Taken together, these actions by Biden and general trends, along with the three major items mentioned above, should be propelling Biden towards as decisive 2024 election victory.

Why isn’t that happening? Why is Biden floundering, despite all of these positive?

DESPITE HIS MANY STRENGTHS, BIDEN’S WEAKNESSES ARE GLARING

In spite of President Biden’s many policy victories, the passage of major legislation focused on the economy, renewable energy, and critical infrastructure in particular, Mr. Biden possesses a number of glaring weaknesses that appear to be substantially overshadowing his strengths.

These principally include the eight factors below:

1. Age, age and age. At 81, Joe Biden is the oldest man ever to occupy the office of the Presidency, and the problem is, that he looks it. He just appears to be old and frail.
2. The mess at the U.S. southern border. Many Americans took exception with some of the harsher elements of President Trump’s anti-immigration policies, but polling suggests they are not in favor of the relatively open border under Mr. Biden. This has become a core weakness for Biden.
3. High inflation as felt in the real wages of lower-income Americans. Although overall core inflation has retreated since peaking in June 2022, there have been longer-term effects on the income of working class Americans that will take time to wash out. For the past three years, lower income Americans have felt real pressure on their pocketbooks.
4. The botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Like the burning of the U.S. embassy in Libya in 2013 did for President Obama, the Afghan withdrawal continues to haunt Mr. Biden. The messy U.S. retreat from Afghanistan created an image of weakness for Mr. Biden that his adroit handling of other policies has failed, for whatever reason, to dispel.
5. The perception of a more chaotic world since 2020, be it because of the wars in Ukraine, Israel or the Sudan, growing numbers of refugees, or what have you.
6. Biden’s refusal to ‘triangulate’. Biden’s refusal to play the game that Bill Clinton played while in office by sometimes staking out middle ground positions politically has very likely alienated some voters in the political center and fed the perception that Biden is too beholden to his left wing. This may, in fact, be true. Either that, or Biden sincerely believes some of his own more radically left positions, to his own political detriment.
7. Fewer news conferences and public appearances than his predecessors. President Biden’s relative drop in number of press conferences since his first year in office have created the perception that Biden is either out of touch, or inaccessible, or has been declining mentally. By the same juncture in their first terms, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had all held more press briefings than has Biden.
8. For the office of the Presidency, perception outweighs reality more than is the case for any other public office in the U.S. or, for that matter, the world. Even if Biden hasn’t actually been experiencing serious age-related decline, just consistently muddled speech that he has always had related to his childhood stutter, the fact that 300 million people perceive him to be declining is, in and of itself, fatal to his re-election chances.

Back in that December 2022 blog post forecasting a Biden victory in 2024, Greymantle made an analogy between Joe Biden and Frank Skeffington, the fictional mayor of Boston in Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 novel, ‘The Last Hurrah’. In ‘The Last Hurrah’, Mayor Skeffington, whom O’Connor loosely based on the real mid-century Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, lost to a younger and more media-savvy opponent.

Greymantle argued in that earlier blog post that Biden is a lot like Frank Skeffington – an old-school political pro, a party machine type of guy, with a strong connection to his constituents, but somewhat wrongfooted by changing social mores and shifts in the media landscape. Despite his liabilities, however, I predicted that Biden, unlike Frank Skeffington in the novel, was going to win his ‘last hurrah’ election bid due to the structural voting advantages held by Democrats (Dems are more favored by women, minorities, and people with a college degree) and Mr. Trump’s high disapproval ratings.

In retrospect, Greymantle’s analogy between Joe Biden and Frank Skeffington was an unintentionally fateful one. As it now appears in retrospect, Biden’s liabilities were somewhat greater than I initially suspected – bad enough to cancel out most of the Democrats’ structural advantages (which don’t extend to the Electoral College, where Republicans have an advantage) – and Donald Trump’s weak points have been well-contained by a seasoned team of advisers during his current run for the White House. So much so, in fact, that Trump now appears to be the stronger candidate.

DONALD TRUMP’S SURPRISING STRENGTHS

In earlier posts on this site, I’ve sketched out Donald Trump’s persistent weaknesses as a candidate and public figure. Principally, these include his ‘high negatives’ in polling numbers that speak to Americans’ perceptions of Trump as crude, divisive and less-than-competent, and the view of many voters that Trump did a poor job handling the COVID-19 pandemic during his last year in office.

In addition to these broad negative perceptions of Trump held by consistent cross-sections of the public (including many Republicans), Democrats and other leftward-leaning Americans hold particularly strong negative feelings for Trump, who they believe to be a threat to women’s rights, the rights and safety of various minority groups’ rights, and a menace to American democracy itself.

How can a public figure encumbered by such intense negative perceptions be favored to win an election for the highest office in the land?

The strange fact is that Mr. Trump also has several strong advantages in his favor, and has benefitted from several years out of office in which he has been able to reconsider, with input from a small circle of trusted advisors, some aspects of how he communicates with the broader public.

These strengths principally include the following seven:

1. Trump has learned to speak less. Keeping quiet during his court appearances and giving shorter speeches at campaign rallies has measurably improved how Americans view Trump. The less Trump speaks, the more voters outside of his core group of supporters like him.
2. Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social media platform, has far fewer subscribers than X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. When Trump was on Twitter during his time in office (2017-2020), his roughly 89 million of Twitter followers would read Trump’s hot-blooded and often inane rantings several times a day. Trump’s postings on Truth Social are no less inflammatory, but the fact that only about 7 million people read them, compared to nearly 100 million at the height of Trump’s Twitter use in 2020, is helpful to public perceptions of him.
3. Trump’s appearance of surprising vigor and vitality for his age (78 years). Donald Trump is only three and a half years younger than President Biden (it’s true!), but he appears to be at least a decade, and on some days two decades, younger than Mr. Biden. In a nation that venerates youth and vigor over age and wisdom, Trump’s physical appearance is a huge advantage.
4. Fewer campaign events than previously. When Trump was first campaigning for the presidency in 2015 and 2016, he would regularly hold 10 campaign events per week, or more, and would make as many as four public appearances per day. During this election cycle, he has held an average of about three campaign events per week, and media coverage of these events has been less intense. This has helped Trump, because less coverage means that the public is less aware of how volatile and emotionally intense Trump is, and can talk themselves into believing in his normalcy.
5. Trump’s utter lack of conventional political principles. The fact that Trump can, and does, change his positions with any shift in the wind, and is prepared to throw long-time allies, including the Heritage Foundation and the pro-life movement under the bus the instant he perceives an advantage in doing so, continues to serve Mr. Trump very well. His acts of relative elevation of, or dispensing with, one group or another at whim can seem very kingly, actually, to rude minds. The fact that Trump is beholden to no one but himself is the source of his power, and is core to the psychology of his supporters, he see him as a kind of king. Some even have taken to portraying him on sitting on a throne. It’s all very un-American, but also highly potent.
6. Greater cynicism and nihilism within the American public. The coarsening of public discourse and entertainment and the belief that the only thing that really matters, in life or in politics, is winning, is of great benefit to Mr. Trump. This process of decay has been going on, in one for or another, for Mr. Trump’s entire lifetime, and he has actively fed it. He knows what he is feeding.
7. The fracturing of reality. As referenced above with the phenomenon of ‘bespoke realities’, the shattering of many common reference points among the public is working to help Mr. Trump. As long as he had his followers and enough cynical, detached, atomized, discontent and angry people on board with him, Donald Trump can sail to victory.

Now factor in Mr. Trump’s narrow survival of the assassination attempt on July 13 and the burst of sympathy it will generate, even among some people how hate him, and you have some idea of how Donald Trump could decisively win the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

HOW DONALD TRUMP COULD STILL LOSE THE ELECTION

As things stand, it’s difficult to see how President Biden can prevail against Trump given the advantages that Trump has racked up in recent months (and I haven’t even mentioned Trump’s legal woes and 34 felony convictions, which appear to have actually helped him politically).

Biden would have to have nothing but ‘good days’, every day from now until November 5, in order to be assured of beating Donald Trump. Perhaps there is some kind of pep pill that the medical community can give Biden that will have him doing jumping jacks and somersaults over the White House, while cracking jokes with the wit and aplomb of Kevin Hart – but I doubt it.

The safer move for Mr. Biden, the Democratic Party, and these United States of America seems to actually be the riskier move: for Biden to drop out of the race and for the Democrats to pick a new candidate at their convention in August. It would be a high-stakes bet, but shaking up the election and finding a candidate who can generate excitement among the base, and who does not carry Mr. Biden’s baggage, actually feels like the more rational, not the less rational move, for the Dems.

The main questions are:

• Will Biden agree to drop out?
• When will he drop out?
• Who will replace him on the Democratic ticket?

Where the third question is concerned, a variety of names have been thrown around, and they all deserve careful consideration. The short list includes:

• Vice President Kamala Harris
• New York Governor Kathy Hochul
• Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer
• Kentucky Governor Andy Bashear
• California Governor Gavin Newsom
• Pennsylvania Governor Joshua Shapiro
• Maryland Governor Wes Moore
• Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown

There are probably a few others who could step into the ring. Names that come to Greymantle’s mind include New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, and Orange County (FL) Mayor Jerry Demings. Greymantle believes that all of these potential candidate would be competitive against Donald Trump.

The fear on the Democratic side is that Trump is a kind of 800-pound gorilla who will just steamroll over any untried challenger in the autumn debates and the campaign trail. Another Democratic fear is that, because Hilary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and because Dems didn’t see it ahead of time, that American voters are just not ready for a female president. Any woman who runs against Trump is somehow going to lose the election. Finally, Democrats fear nominating another Black candidate for the highest office for some of the same reasons.

Of the potential candidates mentioned above, Senator Brown, Governors Whitmer, Bashear and Moore and Governor Evers would tend to neutralize most of these fears. Whitmer is female, but her role as governor of the key Midwestern state of Michigan and her relative success in winning election victories in a blue-collar, “purple” swing state would most likely neutralize anxiety about her sex. Likewise. Kathy Hochul is seen as down-to-earth as having the common touch, party due to her Buffalo roots.

All of these potential Democratic candidates are also younger than Donald Trump, several of them by more than two decades, so the nomination of any of them would shift the discussion about age and the presidency onto Donald Trump, and away from Joe Biden, were he no longer the nominee. Gretchen Whitmer will turn 53 in August, Gavin Newsom is 56, Kamala Harris is 59, Andy Bashear is a very youthful 46 years of age, Wes Moore is 45, Jerry Demings is 65 and Sherrod Brown is 71 – no spring chicken, but seven years younger than Donald Trump.

If President Biden’s biggest weaknesses are his age, the border mess, high inflation and the withdrawal from Afghanistan, then all of those problems effectively disappear with a younger, alternate nominee. High inflation and the Democratic association with ‘Bidenomics’ would likely dog the Democratic nominee somewhat, but be less of a problem for a governor based outside of Washington, DC who did not vote for any of President Biden’s signature policies.

With an alternative nominee, Greymantle believes all of the underlying structural advantages that favor the Democrats would quickly become resurgent and benefit the new nominee, while Mr. Trump’s deep and very longstanding weaknesses would become more visible to a public that is paying closer attention.

TRUMP’S WEAKNESSES REMAIN POWERFUL AND INTRACTABLE

Despite the power of his celebrity and the cult-like devotion of his most dedicated followers, Mr. Trump has all of the vulnerabilities that Greymantle enumerated in this July 2023 blog post.

Trump is mercurial and unpredictable, tart-tongued and given to verbal abuse, undisciplined and often uninformed, has a history of legal problems, and has left behind him a trail of failed businesses and former aides and supporters who are eager to talk about his many character defects, not to mention the manifold dangers to America that would follow upon his return to power.

To Trump’s core supporters, however, enveloped as they are in the protective bubbles of their ‘bespoke realities” these defects of Mr. Trump mean next to nothing, and his worst impulses are seen by his most devoted acolytes as distinct positives.

But to the persuadable, undecided, and less frequent voters, these negatives could amount to quite a lot if they are faced with the choice of pulling the voting lever for either Mr. Trump or Governor Hochul, between Mr. Trump or Governor Evers.

After nine years in politics, Mr. Trump has accrued, in addition to his pre-existing list of black marks and the shame of January 6, two additional disadvantages that are seldom spoken of in the press. These include the absence of the ‘outsider advantage’ that he once possessed when he first ran for office in 2015. For a nation hungry for change and eager to elect outsiders, Mr. Trump no longer represents the potential for some exciting, but rather hazy and undefined, change for the better.

America has tangoed with Trump once before, and has a pretty good idea of how…interesting things could get on a second trip out to the dance floor.

Mr. Trump will crack down on the southern border and round up illegal entrants, for sure, and most likely take steps to further decouple the U.S. economy from China’s. But aside from that, what can Trump really do for less-frequent or Independent voters?

The inflation rate will be largely out of Trump’s hands from a narrow monetary policy standpoint. His predilection for issuing debt, cutting taxes, and enacting tariffs will all have an inflationary effect on the economy. Mr. Trump is no fiscal hawk. A policy of government austerity would bring down inflation, but Trump seems distinctly disinclined to pursue such a path.

Trump’s second new weakness is that he currently doesn’t possess the advantages of incumbency that he did in 2020. Trump’s ability to meddle with the 2024 election process is somewhat more limited than it was four years ago. And voters can always be reminded that Mr. Trump, once back in power, will not be inclined to give it up again, or respect the constitutional two-term limit for U.S. presidents. If elected back into the Oval Office, the nation would face another 2020 situation in 2028, as an 82-year old chief executive attempts to defy the constitution to remain in office past the end of his term.

In a contest between a flawed man who possesses undoubted sanity and a virile, but combustable loose cannon, Greymantle continues to believe, perhaps Pollyanna-like, that enough of the American people will make a choice for sanity to keep the country out of dire straits. Much of what follows will rest on choices made in the coming weeks by the increasingly frail Mr. Biden, but voters should remember that the final choice ultimately lies in their hands. We live in a republic, after all, if we can keep it.

Until next time, I remain –

Greymantle