The 2024 election is Trump’s to lose

Heading into the first presidential debate, the 2024 election is clearly President Donald Trump’s race to lose.

A series of polls released ahead of the debate show just how dire the situation is for President Joe Biden just over four months before the election. Biden’s favorability rating according to Gallup is 37%, the lowest it has been since he launched his presidential election campaign in 2019. Trump, meanwhile, is enjoying 46% favorability, nearly a five-year high for him. That number has also been consistently rising over the past year.

Trump’s lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average is 1.5%, his biggest lead in three months. Trump has been leading in the RealClearPolitics average since October of last year. Election analyst Nate Silver’s election model places Trump’s initial chances of winning the Electoral College at 65.7%. Biden is not even beating Trump on the Democratic Party’s sacred issue of “protecting democracy,” with 38% of swing state voters trusting Trump to handle threats to democracy compared to 29% trusting Biden.

Biden is simply too old and too incompetent for the job, botching several serious issues (such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan) while chasing fringe activist voters (like the handful of climate-obsessed youths Biden thinks are an electoral behemoth) and ignoring issues voters actually care about, such as the economy or the border. On paper, Biden’s 2024 candidacy may make him the worst major party nominee in recent memory, even worse than both sides of the 2016 election.

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This makes it Trump’s election to lose, and he needs to actually put in work not to lose it. Trump carries his own obvious political baggage, and his lack of discipline sank the GOP in the 2018 midterm elections and sank himself in 2020. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the first 2020 presidential debate, where Trump refused to let Biden stumble over his words and instead repeatedly interrupted him. All Trump has to do now is be somewhat normal and stay on message, which he hasn’t been able to do since he stepped onto the political scene.

This election is not going to be a question of whether or not Biden can win. It is going to be about whether Trump can capitalize on Biden’s unpopularity and stay out of his own way long enough to avoid alienating the voters he needs to win. All Trump has to do is stay disciplined, which, in his case, is easier said than done.