Biden Is on Track to Win in November – As He Should Be

Yes, his current approval rating hovers around 40%. It is exceedingly difficult today to find anyone unabashedly bullish about the President’s chances. And yet, while the final result will almost certainly be close, as it consistently has been in this era of gridlocked partisanship, I can comfortably say it is Biden, rather than Trump, who will command the larger set of advantages on Election Day.

Despite the tumultuous nature of our political era, it is still ultimately the same two underlying factors that decide the outcomes of national elections: the decisions of independents and turnout among party faithful. In fact, with party identification numbers as close as can be (Democrats lead in the generic ballot over Republicans by 0.1%, according to a FiveThirtyEight aggregate) and the number of true independents smaller than ever before, small shifts in either of those two metrics will be especially consequential this year. As such, Biden needs only a relatively small change in independent sentiment and relative enthusiasm to go from perceived underdog to frontrunner. From this point forward, those metrics are significantly more likely to shift in the President’s favor than against it, for reasons typical of most presidents seeking reelection as well as reasons unique to this election cycle.

Firstly, incumbent presidents and their parties, as a rule, have a strong electoral advantage in presidential years, especially relative to preceding midterm elections. This can be seen clearly in how their party nearly always performs better in both houses of Congress compared to the last midterms. In the last 20 presidential election years, every incumbent president running for reelection has seen their party’s national popular vote margin increase in both the Senate and House of Representatives races that year compared to the last midterms – except in 1980, 1992 and 2004. As apparently unpopular as Biden may be, he is nowhere near the prospect of the kind of landslide loss Carter suffered in 1980 of his low-30s approval rating, nor the uncommon challenge of defending a 12-year party incumbency as Bush did in 1992 (the 2004 anomaly came after the unprecedented Republican gains in the 2002 midterms). Democrats in Congress also performed atypically well in 2022 – the only time an incumbent president’s party actually increased its popular vote margin in a Senate election in a midterm in the modern political era, besides the atypical 2002 elections – and the President’s approval rating was only two points higher then than it is now. Thus, the indications of a significant and atypical swing away from the incumbent party toward a clear Republican triumph in November for either Congress or the Presidency are scant.

Through the first three years of a president’s term, the vast majority of national attention and scrutiny is placed on the President and their party, not the opposition party; accordingly, there is a stronger incumbent advantage in presidential years compared to midterm years. Midterms are typically considered a “referendum on the President,” not really a comparison between them and their opponents. All the opposition party has to do is convince voters that they should be dissatisfied in some way with the President, not that they themselves are any better. In a presidential year, however, we scrutinize the President and their opponent much more evenly – both appear on the debate stage side-by-side, and both have the same amount of time to make their case and criticize their opponent. The opposition party and their candidate can no longer simply lob arrows at the President while remaining free from serious scrutiny of their own policies and actions.

This typical fading of the opposition party’s advantage over the course of an election year should, of course, play out in the coming months, barring any major unforeseen events aiding Republicans. Biden has already faced criticism for just about every possible liability in the last three years – his age, his rhetorical ability, the economy, border security, too much or too little aid to Ukraine and Israel, being too liberal or not liberal enough. At this point, finding new, previously unexploited lines of attack against Biden is becoming exceedingly difficult. At the same time, in this era of intense polarization, opposing party members have consistently expressed virtually unanimous knee-jerk disapproval for presidents throughout their term,regardless of their accomplishments. This is why the approval ratings of both Trump and Biden have hovered in the low 40s for their entire presidencies. As such, the prospect of any president in this political climate – not just Biden – sustaining an approval rating above 50% is arguably next to impossible. With all this in mind, Republicans’ slim leads in presidential polls and tie in the generic ballot, even after three years of asymmetric scrutiny, leaves them with very little margin for error in the next six months.

Secondly, the election should prove even more advantageous to Biden as the incumbent than the average reelection year because of several factors specific to this election. Firstly, several of the most persistent drags on Biden’s favorability are already losing some of their potency or are highly likely to do so, given current trends. Take, for example, the economy – inflation and economic pessimism have, for much of his term, been widely seen as perhaps the biggest source of anti-Biden sentiment. And yet this issue seems to be fading relatively quickly: inflation is slowing, unemployment has hit record lows, and a widely-feared recession hasn’t happened. Even the Consumer Confidence Index, which records public sentiment about the economy regardless of actual performance, has improved too. The Index (which is measured against the 1985 base level of 100) reached 115 in January of this year after having been in the upper 90s in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms and in the 80s during the 2020 election season (The Conference Board 2024). As such, Republicans are unlikely to be able to rely on negative economic sentiment to boost their support in November, and it may even become a strong point for Biden if indicators continue to improve.

In the absence of a poor economy to rail against, Republicans have already begun to transition to the border and immigration as their biggest bludgeon against the President, with the border having overtaken inflation as voters’ reported top concern in January. And even then, Republicans may struggle to prevent immigration from becoming an outright liability for themselves after having shot down a border security bill supported by the President under pressure from Donald Trump, who openly called the bill a “great gift to the Democrats.” We can likely expect a similar effect with regard to the war in Gaza, Biden's most significant source of dissent from the left flank. With the rapid turnover of the national news cycle, new policies on Gaza and increased attention on domestic policy and the Biden-Trump matchup during the general election, the number of Democrats withholding their vote from Biden for that issue, while hard to determine at this point, will almost certainly be lower than the number declaring they will today. And with both the economy and the border increasingly neutralized as lines of attack against Biden (and potentially outright selling points for him by the time of the election), the case for a Trump presidency will become even more dubious.

The Democrats’ case is further bolstered by the fact that they are in quite a strong relative position policy-wise. Despite similar levels of party identification, the Democratic position is more popular overall with the electorate than the Republican one on almost every major issue of domestic policy. For example, in November 2023 55% of Americans surveyed said they supported a woman’s right to an abortion for any reason, a near-record number (Wall Street Journal). 57% say the government should ensure all Americans have health coverage, including 59% of independents (Gallup 2022). 82% support raising taxes on the wealthy and big corporations (Navigator 2023), 70% support the legalization of marijuana (Gallup 2022), 58% support stricter gun laws (Pew 2023) and 69% support Biden’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2050 (Pew 2022). 61% support Biden’s 2022 student loan debt forgiveness plan, including 63% of independents and even 57% of Republicans under 45 (Data for Progress 2023); 70% supported his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 aid package (Pew 2021), 65% supported the landmark CHIPS and Science Act (Center for American Progress 2022), 65% support the Inflation Reduction Act (including 54% of independents and 42% of Republicans) (Navigator 2023), and 71% supported the right to gay marriage after its codification was signed by President Biden (Gallup 2022). And while it’s true that voting decisions aren’t always made solely on a rational basis of policy alignment, the sheer imbalance here and the fact that Republicans can hardly articulate a single domestic policy position or criticize any of Biden’s major actions as president without alienating a majority of Americans will make stating their case this year very difficult to say the least. Border security could have been the one issue Republicans found an advantage in, with Americans of both parties reporting increasing concern about border crossings – but after voting down the aforementioned border bill for purely political reasons by their own admission, they may have given up their credibility on that issue, too. As a result, the increased national attention to the campaign and debates this Fall should prove a significant advantage for Biden and the Democrats.

The uphill battle Republicans should expect to face this year does not stop there, however. Their inability to avoid a Trump candidacy may represent the final nail in the coffin. While constant attention has been paid in the last three years to Biden’s age and frequent gaffes, Republicans will likely see the degree of their advantage on that issue diminish from now on, with their own nominee barely younger than Biden and now showing signs of mental deterioration himself. Despite the turn-off of Biden’s alleged senility, he does not seem to have deteriorated much in that regard since the last election – the same signs were widely observed in the 2020 election, which he still managed to win. Trump, on the other hand, is increasingly exhibiting signs of mental deterioration that were not apparent four years ago. Take, for example, his confused statement last month that Nikki Haley controlled Capitol security during January 6th. He has confused President Biden for former President Obama no less than seven times in recent months, repeatedly referring to Obama as the current president. He appeared to slur and garble his words in multiple recent speeches, in one of which he also referred to Viktor Orbán as the leader of Turkey; more recently he referred to his wife Melania as “Mercedes” and in another speech forgot his son Eric – who happened to be standing right behind him – when listing all his children. When it comes to the issue of mental fitness, Americans may find themselves more surprised by the extent of Trump’s cognitive decline when he hits the general election campaign than by the Biden gaffes they’re accustomed to and expect.

And that’s all to say nothing of Trump’s increased political extremism and authoritarian rhetoric since the last election as well. In addition to the new baggage of January 6th (for which a majority of Americans say they believe he should have been charged with a crime, according to a 2023 ABC News/IPSOS poll), the former president has now twice said he wishes to be a dictator “for one day.” He has also referred to political opponents as “vermin” and said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Attention has also been drawn to the alarming Project 2025, whose stated goal is to implement the maximalist unitary executive theory (that the President possesses absolute power over the executive branch) by filling the federal civil service with party loyalists, dismantling the FBI and directing the Department of Justice to pursue Trump adversaries. Included among the Project’s Advisory Board are several prominent former Trump administration officials and advisers, including Stephen Miller, Mark Meadows, Ben Carson and Peter Navarro.

So while the closeness of elections in the present political era means anything could happen – Trump could certainly win – a bet on Biden will be the safest bet this November, as will become more and more apparent as the months go on. And in order to ensure this, Democrats still cannot afford complacency. During the general election campaign, more attention must be drawn to Biden’s accomplishments. He has arguably the most impressive record of landmark progressive legislation in his first two years of any president since Lyndon Johnson over 50 years ago, including the largest-ever investments in infrastructure and clean energy, $300 billion of private investment in domestic manufacturing, a $35 cap on insulin prices for Medicare recipients (previously frequently over $300), the first major gun control legislation in 30 years, the codification of gay marriage, increased health benefits for veterans, over $100 billion in student loan debt forgiveness, efforts to lessen the severity of anti-marijuana laws and new criminal justice reforms among many others; polling indicates all of these policies are popular with most Americans. And yet most of the American public is apparently unaware of much of this, with over 60% saying he had accomplished “little or nothing” in his first two years in office (Washington Post 2023). Biden and the Democrats must aggressively highlight these accomplishments, and especially draw comparison between themselves and the utter embarrassment of the Republican-controlled House since 2023, which was the first in American history to oust its own Speaker and has succeeded in advancing essentially zero policy priorities besides a Biden impeachment inquiry most independents as well as Democrats oppose. This despite having the same five-seat majority in the House that Democrats did in the previous two years with a very different record to show for it to say the least.

As such, Democrats should not begrudgingly cast their ballots for Biden in November, but eagerly for a president with a stronger progressive record than anyone would have expected at the start of his term. The peril of a second Trump presidency will be clear. Democrats should go into campaign season with enthusiasm, purpose and belief, and assertively use the electoral advantages of their candidate to ensure a deserved victory.