A year ago, the Republican Party achieved a disappointing result in the legislative elections, the worst for an opposition party in 20 years. All eyes turned to Donald Trump. The Republican cadres pointed out the excessive prominence of the former president in the campaign and the rejection of the candidates sponsored by him as causes of the fiasco. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis then emerged with a spectacular re-election. A year later, despite having four indictments for 91 alleged crimes on his back, or partly thanks to it, and despite the chaos caused by his party in the House of Representatives, Trump is not only the favorite by far in the primaries Republicans, but also narrowly surpasses Joe Biden in the incipient presidential polls. The hypothesis that he returns to the White House four years after the assault on the Capitol has become plausible.
The 2024 elections are momentous. Biden has warned that Trump, who has not yet admitted his 2020 defeat, is a risk to democracy. The former president presents them almost as the verdict of a popular jury made up of all voters while launching accusations of politicization of justice. The victory of one or the other means divergent directions for domestic and international politics. The two more than likely candidates generate rejection in the majority of citizens.
Dave Wasserman, election analyst at Cook Political Report, pointed out last month: “What’s so wild about the current political environment is that if the 2024 election were held this November, I think Biden’s numbers are so bad that he would lose to an impeached Trump and the House Republicans are so dysfunctional and out of themselves 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
In the Republican primaries there seems to be no room for surprise. According to the Fivethirtyeight poll average, Trump has a voting intention of 58.3%, compared to 14% for Ron DeSantis and 7.7% for Nikki Haley. The starting signal will be given on January 15 in the Iowa caucuses and the election of elders is concentrated in the first quarter, with no time for Trump’s judicial calendar to alter the forecasts.
There is a whole year left for the presidential elections on November 5, 2024. That is a long time and more in an election that is so close and that depends on a handful of states that tip the balance (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, mainly). There are also some factors that can affect the result. The most obvious are the trials against Trump (two of them for trying to rig the result of the previous elections), including a possible prison sentence, but the progress of the economy and the international situation may also end up having an important weight. Added to this is another variable that is very difficult to calibrate: the presence of the independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Cornel West.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe
With all these caveats and a few more, the polls carried out so far favor Donald Trump, practically even with Biden in the popular vote, but ahead in most of the key states. The average of national polls calculated by the aggregator RealClearPolitics grants Trump an advantage over Biden of 0.5 points in the popular vote (45.4% compared to 44.9%). One year after the 2016 elections, Hillary Clinton had a lead of 2.1 points (at the moment of truth she won by two points in the popular vote, but lost the presidency in the electoral college) and one year after the elections of In 2020, Biden led Trump by 8.9 points (in the end he won by 4.5 points), according to that same firm. The current equality is so great that not even the models of the survey aggregators coincide. RacetotheWH gives Biden a lead of one tenth and 270towin gives Trump the winner by 1.2 points.
There are two factors in the polls that grant the former president a privileged position. The first is that when voters are not asked only about Biden and Trump, but also Kennedy Jr and West are included in the shaker, the advantage widens to 3.3 points in RealClearPolitics, 1.1 points in RacetotheWH and 2.6 points in 270towin. And he does it not so much for Kennedy Jr, who despite coming from the Democratic Party seems to subtract more votes from Trump with his anti-vaccine positions, but for the African-American leftist philosopher and political activist Cornel West.
The second factor is that Trump has an advantage in key states. The presidential election is indirect. Each state designates as many delegates to the electoral college as the representation it has in Congress, which, with three electoral votes from the capital, the District of Columbia, adds up to 538. 270 are needed to win and, with minimal exceptions, the one that wins in a state he takes all its votes, from the 3 of the least populated (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, mostly Republican states. Among safe, probable and relatively decided states (in these there is more room for surprise), the Democrats have almost tied up 241 electoral votes under normal conditions and the Republicans, 235.
The decisive states
The battle centers on Pennsylvania’s 19 delegates, Georgia’s 16, Arizona’s 11, Wisconsin’s 10 and Nevada’s 6, plus perhaps Michigan, with its 11. Biden won all six states in 2020 and Trump needs recover at least three. With the polls one year before the elections, the math is coming out. The 270towin model It puts the former president ahead in Arizona (+4.5 points), Georgia (+4), Wisconsin (+2) and Pennsylvania (+1) and only gives an advantage to Biden 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 putting Biden 1.4 points ahead in Nevada and 0.1 points in Pennsylvania. With both equations, Trump would be president.
César Martínez, who teaches at the George Washington University school of political management and has been a Republican Party strategist in four presidential campaigns, was part of the so-called Lincoln Project in 2020, which mobilized traditional Republican consultants who wanted to prevent the re-election of Trump. “The possibility of Trump winning is so great that we have to revive that effort we made,” he tells EL PAÍS.
In 2016, he says, “Trump winning was an accident of democracy and the electoral college; If he wins in 2024 it would be masochism,” warning that a second term without having to maintain form in the face of re-election could be more harmful than the first. In his opinion, in 2020, “Biden did not win, but Trump lost” and he believes that any other Republican candidate would beat the now president, who only has a chance against his predecessor. “No one wants him to be the Republican nominee more than Biden,” he says.
Democrats believe that Biden is capable of beating Trump again. In his 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 for more rights and not less.” And she believes that they will prevail over what she considers extremist ideas of the Republicans: “rigging the economy to benefit the richest and big companies, cutting Social Security and Medicare, prohibiting abortion and denying the holding of free and fair elections.” fair.” The key to the Democratic strategy is that the elections are not perceived as a referendum on Biden’s continuity, in the lowest hours of his popularity, but rather as a choice between two opposing options.
Republicans paint a country in decline, focus their messages on immigration, crime and inflation, in addition to closing ranks in what they consider a political persecution of Trump in the courts and attacking Biden’s age, 80, although Trump be 77 years old.
Chavez points out that the Biden campaign has a running machine and full saddlebags. He has begun launching campaigns in key states, while Republicans are still competing in the primaries and Trump spends 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, illustrated by his presence on a motor strike picket line. One of the added difficulties is retaining the support of key electoral niches 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, especially among young people and Arab Americans. “This campaign will be won by doing the work and ignoring outside gossip, just as we did in 2020,” concludes Biden’s campaign manager.
“It’s going to be a contested 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.
Follow all the international information on Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#accused #Trump #leads #polls #year #presidential #elections