Yes, Trump Can Win in 2024

He can't make himself look any better. But Joe Biden can make himself look bad enough to toss out.

Since 2020, one of the key points in most sane, serious Republicans’ case against re-nominating Donald Trump has been the certainty that he’s unelectable in a general election. I argued the same more than once last year. Between all the stars that had to align for him to barely win in 2016, him being a drag on the GOP in every election since, him already losing to Joe Biden once before, the 2022 Red Wave That Wasn’t despite how terrible Biden’s first two years were, the various indictments against him, the Trump-GOP fundraising crisis, and how much worse Trump and MAGA have gotten since 2020, it’s only natural to conclude Trump would be dead-on-arrival in November.

But that conventional wisdom is no longer tenable. It’s time for we conservatives in exile to grapple with the reality that not only can Trump win, he very well might be the favorite to win.

Don’t misunderstand: Trump is absolutely the weakest presidential nominee Republicans could have possibly gone with. He is the only reason Biden still has a chance at a second term, and the only reason Biden is still Democrats’ presumptive nominee; if we were on track to nominate Ron DeSantis, they absolutely would have replaced Sundown Joe with a younger model by now.

But Biden’s comprehensive awfulness may well be Trump’s saving grace. Voters aren’t satisfied with his economy. Everybody recognizes his criminal negligence on the border; even Democrats are getting sick of the mess it’s making in their backyards. His cognitive impairment is getting so hard to cover up that even the mainstream media is talking about it (presumably because they want to jolt their party into replacing him with a more viable Democrat, but still). And the electorate seems to be adding it all up; Trump’s inability to make himself look good and severe fundraising handicaps may not matter as long as Biden keeps doing everything humanly possible to make himself look bad.

According to the polling aggregators at Race to the WH, Trump currently leads Biden 44.9% to 42.7% nationally, and is currently looking at a 312-225 Electoral College victory. Out of their 30 most recent polls as of February 22 (both national and state), Biden only wins two of them. Trump has been trending up and Biden trending down for months. RealClearPolitics’ findings are similar (oh, and contrary to another popular assumption, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to hurt Biden more than he does Trump). As for how seriously these polls should be taken, the Iowa primary debacle should have been enough to get us to kick the “they’re all a psyop!” habit.

How does Team Biden plan to overcome all this? Not by moderating on anything. Not by reversing any of their open-border policies. Not by hitting the brakes on spending or doing anything else to get inflation under control. Instead of doing anything to get moderates and independents to hate him less, Biden is doubling down on lame, hard-left pandering: the “threat to democracy,” abortion, even trying to blame Republicans for his own border crisis.

These are the sorts of issues and claims that drive ideological voters and committed partisans, who already made up their minds how to vote long ago. The people in the middle who actually decide elections? They want to know whose win would benefit them, and right now, the simple fact is that Biden’s case on that score is abysmal, which automatically makes Trump’s case strong. Non-MAGA voters don’t like Trump, they think he’s an idiot and a jerk and a sleaze, they’re not thrilled that he and Biden are once more their only real options...but that doesn’t mean any of that will outweigh average Americans’ more immediate concerns about the things that directly affect their daily lives. Outside the bubble we political junkies live in, perceived self-interest usually trumps ideological abstractions.

The one major qualifier to all this that continues to persist in the polls is how a possible criminal conviction impacts Trump’s support. This month, an NBC News poll found that Biden flips from a 5-point loss to a 2-point lead if Trump is found guilty of a felony, which would hurt Trump among multiple demographic groups. A Reuters/Ipsos survey also from February found that 51% of Republicans won’t support Trump if he’s convicted, and 25% more are unsure. That’s a big sword hanging over Donald’s head, and yet another reason it was so staggeringly irresponsible to nominate him. Once the more serious trials get going, they will be a steady source of bad press that could do some damage to his current standing. But it’s far from certain that any of the cases he’s currently facing will go to verdict before November (which means that if he becomes president again we’re still in for a massive mess, but that’s another column).

No doubt the lion’s share of conservative insistence that Trump’s DOA is simple, genuine certainty. As acknowledged in the opening paragraph, that’s the intuitive conclusion for a candidate so obviously terrible. But I suspect that some part of it is also driven by wanting to wash our hands of any responsibility for a Democrat victory—if he can’t win anyway, it doesn’t matter that I didn’t vote for him. We can see it in the ubiquity of the same people vehemently insisting that general elections aren’t binary choices, which they are.

That’s all understandable, but ultimately wrong. When two weak, unpopular, unlikeable candidates are foisted on an unenthusiastic populace, of course each of them stands a chance of being hated marginally less than the other guy when all is said and done. Which means there’s no easy way out of the consequences for how we vote this year.

Conservatives refusing to vote for Donald Trump could mean another four years of Joe Biden. Which, given the threat MAGA poses to the long-term survival of the American Right, we should not be afraid to own.