Could it really be the case that voters want what the Democrats are offering, while recoiling from their President?

Twelve months out from Election Day, the Presidential campaign has inescapably begun with the slow, ominous, upward crank of a roller coaster. For Democrats, the opening stages of the ride were particularly grim. A Times/Siena College poll published last weekend found that, of the six swing states that are expected to decide the election, President Joe Biden trails Donald Trump in all but one—Wisconsin—and would likely lose if the vote were held today. Within the Democratic Party, the possibility of another four years of Trump was alarming on a spiritual level, and panic set in. Barack Obama’s political guru David Axelrod suggested in a post that Biden needed to decide whether a second run is “in his best interest or the country’s.”

During the Biden era, polls have tended to signal doom for Democratic candidates, but elections have generally turned out all right for them. For all the foreboding in the air, last Tuesday’s Election Night went well for the Democrats, who once again campaigned on abortion rights, and once again won. In deep-red Kentucky, not only did the popular young Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, comfortably win a second term but he pulled back some coal counties in Appalachia that had been thought lost to his party. In Virginia, where Republicans had expended immense effort to try to win a state Senate majority for Governor Glenn Youngkin, they not only failed but lost control of the state House, too. In Ohio, which Trump won handily twice, a ballot initiative to guarantee abortion access in the state constitution passed, fifty-seven to forty-three per cent. Now it was the Republicans’ turn to panic. The conservative pundit Ann Coulter wrote online, “pro-lifers are going to wipe out the republican party.” Could it really be the case that voters want what the Democrats are offering, while recoiling from their President?

Maybe so. This is a country, after all, of high variance. When Biden was picked as the Party’s nominee in 2020, it was done the way you might select a contractor—his skills were specific to the job at hand. Trump had succeeded in 2016 by casting the Democrats as the party of liberal culture warriors and future-obsessed élites, and by winning the support of voters without college degrees. Biden had run for President twice before, generating little enthusiasm, but in 2020 he played the safe hand—not too new, not too radical, not too coastal or élite, the nice guy to Trump’s unceasing invective. Democratic primary voters fixated on denying Trump another term to a sometimes unnerving degree. Campaign reporters often found voters less concerned about explaining why they liked a particular candidate than about asking how the candidate was playing before other, more decisive groups of voters in different parts of the country. It was an unusual situation. It was also perfect for Biden.

The situation is a bit different this time. What is plaguing Biden’s 2024 campaign is a more basic lack of interest, especially among young voters, nonwhite voters, and those without college degrees. In 2020, Biden won nonwhite voters under the age of forty-five by thirty-nine points, but according to the Times/Siena poll he now leads among that group by just six points, and is essentially tied with Trump among voters younger than twenty-nine. Biden’s problems have something to do with a general impression—held by seventy-one per cent of respondents, compared with thirty-nine per cent for Trump—that he is simply too old to be President. Yet voters also believe by wide margins—fifty-nine per cent to thirty-seven—that Trump would be better than Biden at managing the economy. The sharp rise in prices seems to figure more for voters than the continuously strong jobs numbers that the White House has been trying to tout. Young and nonwhite voters usually support Democrats, which might make the White House optimistic that Biden can win them back. But the specific complaints that voters have are hard for Biden to do much about. Prices are high because of the way the global economy has rebounded from the pandemic. He’s old because of the inexorable march of time.

Is the 2024 election just another iteration of the same dynamic that has been in place since Trump descended his escalator? Call this campaign Act III of the political horror serial titled “Trump.” And yet Trump himself—who has denied any wrongdoing, but is facing trial for everything from saying that his apartment was three times its actual size, in order to get better loan terms, to trying to overturn a Presidential election—isn’t exactly the same. He is skipping the Republican primary debates and otherwise scarcely campaigning, holding occasional rallies before crowds to whom he mocks his opponents and vows that he’ll win redemption following 2020. Few seem especially roused by Trump’s campaign, in any event. That seems the biggest difference. Democrats describe this election as if democracy itself were on the ballot, and, given Trump’s talk of dismantling the nonpartisan civil service and of “retribution,” in some senses it may well be. But the mood on the trail and in the polls isn’t of an apocalyptic fight against authoritarianism; with young voters tuning out, and two candidates who are broadly disliked, it’s of creeping democratic exhaustion.

It has been an exhausting few years. Trump seems pretty fatigued—there have been a lot of depositions. So does Biden, who is now trying to manage two wars indirectly, one of which has required linking his reputation to his old antagonist Benjamin Netanyahu. In nearly three years as President, Biden has accomplished much of what he might reasonably have been expected to, given the tight legislative margins: managing the economic turmoil of covid, investing in infrastructure to spur the economy’s green transition, restoring traditional overseas alliances in the fight for a free Ukraine. The result of all this achievement has been that he has gone from being a popular politician to an unpopular one.

Democratic partisans might object that evaluating a Presidency after three years is like asking a homeowner how she feels about a renovation project that’s only partway done. (“Well, there’s no roof yet—somewhat disapprove.”) Maybe worries about abortion rights and the Trumpist threat to democracy will carry Biden to victory next fall, as they have done for the Democrats in the past few elections. But the danger encoded in the polls is that enough voters might come to see Biden as embodying a stagnant status quo and Trump as the alternative to it, which feels a little too close for comfort to 2016. ♦