A year ago, the Republican Party achieved a disappointing result in the general election, the worst for an opposition party in 20 years. All eyes were on Donald Trump. The Republican cadres pointed to the excessive prominence of the former president in the election campaign and the rejection of the candidates he supported as the reasons for the fiasco. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis then achieved a spectacular re-election. A year later, despite having four indictments for 91 alleged crimes under his belt, or thanks in part to it, and despite the chaos his party has wreaked in the House of Representatives, Trump is not only by far the Republican favorite in the primaries, but also He also narrowly outperformed Joe Biden in the early presidential elections. The hypothesis that he will return to the White House four years after the storming of the Capitol has become plausible.
The 2024 elections are significant. Biden has warned that Trump, who has yet to concede defeat in 2020, poses a threat to democracy. The former president portrays it almost as the verdict of a popular jury made up of all voters, and at the same time accuses the judiciary of politicizing. The victory of one or the other means different directions for national and international politics. The two more than likely candidates are rejected by the majority of citizens.
Dave Wasserman, an election analyst at Cook Political Report, noted last month: “What’s so wild about the current political environment is that Biden’s numbers, in my opinion, are so bad if the 2024 election were held in November that he would be up against an impeached Trump “and the Republicans in the House of Representatives are so dysfunctional and left out that they would lose the majority.” For her part, Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chávez wrote in a strategy report last week: “We expect it to be a very close race. “
No surprise in the Republican primaries
There appears to be no room for surprises in the Republican primaries. According to the Fivethirtyeight polling average, Trump has a vote intention rating of 58.3%, compared to 14% for Ron DeSantis and 7.7% for Nikki Haley. The Iowa caucuses kick off on Jan. 15, and the elders’ election is concentrated in the first quarter, giving Trump’s court calendar no time to change forecasts.
There is still a whole year left until the presidential elections on November 5, 2024. That’s a long time, and more, in an election that is so close and depends on a handful of states making the difference (mainly Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona). There are also some factors that can affect the result. The most obvious are the trials against Trump (two of them for attempting to manipulate the results of the previous elections), including a possible prison sentence, but economic developments and the international situation could also end up being very important. There is also another variable that is very difficult to calibrate: the presence of independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West.
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With all of these caveats and a few more, the polls so far favor Donald Trump, virtually tied with Biden in the popular vote but ahead in most key states. The national poll average calculated by aggregator RealClearPolitics gives Trump a 0.5-point advantage over Biden in the popular vote (45.4% vs. 44.9%). A year after the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton had a lead of 2.1 points (at the moment of truth, she won the popular vote by two points but lost the presidency in the Electoral College) and a year after the 2020 election, Biden was ahead, according to the same firm with 8.9 points ahead of Trump (in the end he won by 4.5 points). The current equality is so great that even the survey aggregator models don’t agree. RacetotheWH gives Biden a one-tenth lead and 270towin gives Trump the winner by 1.2 points.
There are two factors in the polls that give the former president a privileged position. The first is that the lead widens to 3.3 points at RealClearPolitics, 1.1 points at RacetotheWH and 2.6 points at 270towin when voters are asked not just about Biden and Trump, but also Kennedy Jr. and West in the shaker can be included. And he does it not so much for Kennedy Jr., who despite his membership in the Democratic Party appears to be stealing more votes from Trump with his anti-vaccination stance, but for the African-American left-wing philosopher and political activist Cornel West.
The second factor is that Trump has the advantage in key states. The presidential election is indirect. Each state nominates as many delegates to the Electoral College as it has in Congress, which, with three electoral votes from the capital, the District of Columbia, makes 538. It takes 270 to win, and with minimal exceptions, the one who wins in a state gets all of its votes, from the three least populated states (like Alaska, Wyoming or Vermont, for example) to the 28 in New York, the 30 in Florida, the 40 in Texas and the 54 in California, in a system that favors less populated, predominantly Republican states. Among the safe, likely and relatively decided states (where there is more room for surprises), Democrats received nearly 241 electoral votes under normal conditions and Republicans received 235.
The decisive states
The focus of the fight are the 19 delegates from Pennsylvania, the 16 from Georgia, the 11 from Arizona, the 10 from Wisconsin and the 6 from Nevada. Biden won all five states in 2020 and Trump needs to win back at least three. With the polls a year before the elections, the calculation comes to light. The 270towin model puts the former president ahead in Arizona (+4.5 points), Georgia (+4), Wisconsin (+2) and Pennsylvania (+1), and only gives Biden an advantage in Nevada (+2 points ). RacetotheWH gives Trump a 3.1 point lead in Georgia; 2.8 points in Arizona and 1.1 points in Wisconsin, while Biden is ahead by 1.4 points in Nevada and 0.1 points in Pennsylvania. With both equations, Trump would be president.
César Martínez, who teaches at George Washington University’s School of Political Management and has served as a Republican Party strategist in four presidential campaigns, was part of the so-called Lincoln Project in 2020, which mobilized traditional Republican advisers seeking to prevent re-election. Election of Trump. “The probability that Trump will win is so great that we have to restart our efforts,” he tells EL PAÍS.
In 2016, he said: “Trump’s victory was an accident of democracy and the Electoral College; “If he wins in 2024, that would be masochism.” In his opinion, in 2020 “Biden didn’t win, but Trump lost” and he believes that any other Republican candidate would beat the current president, who only has a chance against his predecessor has. “Nobody wants him to be the Republican nominee more than Biden,” he says.
Democrats believe Biden is capable of beating Trump again. In her strategy report, Julie Chavez is committed to repeating the same messages that worked in 2020 and 2022: “Protect democracy and the soul of the nation, make the economy work for the middle class, fight You for more rights and not for less”. And he believes they will prevail against what he sees as the Republicans’ extremist ideas: “Manipulating the economy in favor of the richest and large corporations, cutting Social Security and Medicare, banning abortion and refusing to hold free and fair elections.” The Key to the Democrats’ strategy is that the elections are perceived not as a referendum on the continuity of Biden at his lowest moments of popularity, but rather as a choice between two opposing options.
Republicans are painting a country in decline, focusing their messages on immigration, crime and inflation, closing ranks in what they see as a political prosecution of Trump in court and attacking Biden’s age of 80 even though Trump is 77.
Chavez points out that the Biden campaign has a running machine and full saddlebags. He has begun campaigning in key states while Republicans are still competing in the primaries and Trump is spending much of his donations on lawyers. The idea is to sell the president’s legislative achievements, his investments in infrastructure, job creation, especially in the industrial sector, and his support for workers, expressed by his presence on a motorist picket line. One of the additional difficulties is maintaining support in key electoral pockets for Democrats, such as young people and minorities such as African Americans, Latinos and Arab Americans. Support for Israel has hurt him on the left wing of the electorate, particularly among young people and Arab Americans. “This campaign will be won by doing the work and ignoring outside gossip, like we did in 2020,” Biden’s campaign manager concludes.
“It will be a controversial campaign, but it’s like watching the same movie with the same actors and the same dialogues,” says Martínez. Of course with the ending to be written.
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