So, it is May now and the consensus really is that the general election of 2024 began in earnest in March. A lot of people point to the big state of the union speech Biden gave as the kick off or towards Nikki Haley dropping out. Before then while you can say some people had been running since 2020 a number of factors have compressed. I firmly believe that Trump was not inherently going to be the nominee for the Republican Party (likely, yes, but not assured). Someone outside of Dean Phillips could have, in theory, run a campaign against Biden (though I sincerely doubt such a candidate would have won).

However, with sixmonths between now and the election I thought I’d write where I think the campaign is in general. To summarize: its May, a lot can happen in six months and we have a host of unknowns but several data points.

I maintain that having an election running this long (which is ahistorical for much of the modern presidency until 2008) is not a good thing. It is frighteningly expensive for one thing and as someone who thinks money in political campaigns needs to be tightly monitored and reviewed that is troubling. I also firmly believe it exhaust nuance in the modern media which needs fresh headlines constantly to feed the void and drive advertisement interest. I also firmly believe it tires people out, and frankly a large portion of the country who will vote are not paying attention (we’ll get to that so stick a pin in it for now).

In many ways as of right now this has looked and acted like a very normal, though long, campaign. In many ways it has been deeply normal in its contours despite the personalities and everything else. In many ways this gives us a fairly good concept of the direction of things. There are two oddities. 1) We have not seen a candidate who lost the presidency run for a nonconsecutive term and win his presidential primary in well over a century. 2) it is odd that a candidate is under multiple indictments and is currently on trial. Honestly, no one truly knows how those factors will impact the race.

While I don’t agree very often with Andy Craig and his commentary I don’t disagree with his assertion on March 28th www.theunpopulist.net/p/biden-vs-tr.....mp-is-the-rematch-that The fact is that while generally neither candidate is particularly popular with the general population they remain popular within their parties. There is also a very good argument that a lot of that unpopularity for both candidates is a stridency of party politics weighing the scale that didn’t exist culturally in decades past (I remain skeptical but I will admit the evidence is compelling).

This is the actual big unknown of the political race: both candidates are well known figures who have served in the office. For decades we have usually seen relative unknowns who need to be introduced to he general public and both campaigns spend gobs of money trying to frame public perception of the candidates and their stances. This is an odd occurrence we do not often see. It also means people have very intense ingrained views of both candidates, but we know how they will act in office. We’ve rarely seen that, and it likely does impact polling and perceptions.

I likely have a longer essay to say about polling, I’ll leave off on it mostly. Unless people want to read a very dry treatise. I will remind everyone polling is indicative not predictive (a thing I say often). It tells you how voters feel currently (or because most polls take time to organize their data how polled people felt some time prior to when you view it. People can respond to polling data and change and people will change their views as events go on. This far out from an election (six months) I usually urge caution on reading the polls too closely. I also think people have to have skepticism because (as will be noted later) a significant portion of the country isn’t paying attention yet and when someone asks a persona question on a topic they haven’t thought about you can get some pretty wild answers.

Which brings us to primaries, famously tricky to poll due to their small numbers, and people using them as a data point. As I have said over many years we must treat the primaries with a certain level of skepticism. Primaries rarely are predictive on end results, especially as their numbers and turn out are very small fractions of the overall population. I don’t think we can ignore he data from the primaries, but it should be treated carefully. The data does seem to show problems for both candidates.

President Joe Biden in the primaries I would argue has shown some positive aspects. He clearly has a well manage and organized ground game in most of the states for turn out, registration, and organization. This isn’t like 2012 where Obama had several bad news cycles because he did poorly in primaries (like having a convicted felon defeat him in West Virginia). The Biden campaign clearly wants to avoid that and he’s had solid turn out and support. To me that says: good ground organization. You can not have Biden winning New Hampshire definitively without a good turn out operation. Biden, lest we all forget, was not on the New Hampshire primary ballot this year. So, voters were turned out to write his name in (Properly) and win him a majority which happened.

That is all true but at the same time he clearly has a dissatisfied section of voters turning out in primaries and voting significantly, notably in Michigan and New York. Not in every state but in enough that the Biden campaign should be concerned. A lot of that is likely based on the current conflict in Israel and Palestine. That points to problems in the general election (though to what extent some will debate. I tend to think it will be a problem that needs to be addressed).

In many ways, Joe Biden in my opinion, has failed to meet the moment on policy, failed to handle a serious problem, and failed to communicate his goals and how long-term policy will change (because the status quo is clearly not working). Will that have an impact? No idea, it is May and the election is six months away, but this has clearly upset a portion of registered voters who are not happy.

By the same token and logic we can not ignore the fact that Trump has clearly had problems in his primaries and there is a dissatisfied section of registered Republicans at least in the primaries. Again, primaries have small populations in turn out. Some people want to dismiss the results claiming they are mischief makers from the Democrats. However, even if we look at closed primaries (where you MUST be a registered republican to vote) after Haley (the last challenger to Trump) stepped out we see in chronological order: Florida (19% against), Kansas (25% against), Connecticut (22% against), New York (18% against), and Pennsylvania (17% against). These are people who actively took time out of their day to vote in a primary against the person who has already secured a win. These are the people who will show up on election day as they’re dedicated voters. Nearly a quarter of them are not pleased with Trump.

The important detail to note is that these results mirror the open primary states matching with similar numbers. This undercuts the argument of a mass ground swell of trouble making Dems flooding these primaries. You’d have to assume sprawling conspiracy to organize people to change their registration and turn out to vote. That seems unlikely.

Are these eye-popping staggering numbers? No, but they shouldn’t be ignored just as you shouldn’t ignore Biden’s percentiles. Most of those people will end up supporting Trump in the ballot box, but if even a fraction do not show up or leave the presidential section blank that is a problem for Trump. The simple fact is to use Pennsylvania as an example that 17% translates to 116,000 people which isn’t much (that would be considered a midsized town or suburb) until you remember that Biden won PA by 80,000 votes. So, one has to wonder where independents and others are on this one.

Again, one must be extremely careful. Primaries are small population samples and there is no serious evidence they predict results in the general election. They are weird and tend to attract very involved voters. Further campaigns can and do adapt to problems and work on them. I think Biden’s campaign has at least made a token attempt to communicate with those within Democratic circles dissatisfied with him, I am less convinced with Trump dealing with such things. I suspect the Trump Campaign takes it as a given these dissatisfied primary voters will be coming back into the fold and want to focus on nontraditional voters. However, it is May, and you can easily repair such things over several months so it is a freefloating data point at this time. In this field there is a lot of behind the scenes work that isn’t going to be reported or seen by people.

Which brings us to the issue I mentioned above that large numbers of people are not really paying attention. This is a very old and settled point in political science and 2024 has not shown much variation on this point. A significant portion of the population just doesn’t pay attention to an election until October. September at the earliest. There are a significant number of people who aren’t actually aware Biden and Trump are the two candidates for president from the major parties much less who will be on their ballots in down ticket races. They’re not aware of the issues or current events in politics beyond generalities. They just aren’t paying attention yet except once in a while to a headline.

It must be stressed that many of these people do get informed. They do pay attention and research. There is ample strong evidence these people go into the ballot booth informed. They just aren’t doing it now, and honestly considering this is a marathon over long presidential campaign I can’t say they are wrong. Many of these people will vote for their preferred party because that works for them, but you can say the same thing of people who are paying attention now. Will there be deeply misinformed voters who aren’t paying attention? Yes, obviously, but I defy anyone to tell me there are people paying attention now who aren’t incredibly arbitrary and misinformed.

There is a famous anecdotal story from 1988 (and one I find apocryphal) where in people chose to vote against George H.W. Bush because of the frequency of times he looked at his watch and that sunk his campaign. Evidence has always been lacking but a lot of people have a bad tendency of referencing that type of story to shame and diminish those who don’t pay attention at all times. I’d like people to generally be better informed but I’d be lying if I said I was well informed myself and I question if people need to hear every news headline at once. Sometimes you’re better informed if you wait and see how an event plays out.

A lot of money, really an obscene amount, is going to be spent this election cycle on turn out and commercials trying to frame the candidates and attach policies. All of this in service to reaching not just the voters who are ignoring the current election news right now but potential voters who were unsure about voting or those who need outreach. To say nothing of the cottage industry of lawyers that have built up around the political parties like a barnacle reef.

There is a regular and robust debate on the utility and value of campaign outreach offices, local organization, and get out the vote operations. The counter argument goes campaigns are most effective when they energize the voters to turn out in various ways through rhetoric and speeches. You don’t need hesitant voter turn out you can’t predict if your voters aren’t hesitant. There is a reasonable evidence that they can become a way to bilk campaigns of money and that their effectiveness can vary. Similarly, commercials and campaign communication can also be a trap for wasted funds. I tend to believe these things can be useful if properly and competently run. I think they can have diminishing returns, but it is better to have a well-run system on a local level turning out and getting votes. It does take money, however, to do such outreach and offices.

A lot of ink has been spilled that the Biden campaign has been having very successful fund raising reports since March. That the backbone of their operation has been small donations under $200. They have been spending it expanding the Biden turn out operations and organization I mentioned above along with an aggressive advertisement buy. Similarly a lot of reporting has noted the Trump campaign has had weak fund raising numbers and their small donor pool has not been as forthcoming according to those reports. This is actually an area that has been fascinating as for a long time as Trump’s campaign famously will not share its donor rolodex with the Republican party as a whole unlike Biden with the various Democratic Party operations. Trump now has to in theory turn to the Republican’s various call sheets and contacts to fundraise. Trump has had fewer rallies as well and his rallies have had smaller numbers turn out since 2022. This gets pointed out a lot, and I don’t disagree with the data points but I think there are caveats.

We’re still six months out and serious fundraising often happens in the summer after the conventions or right before. I’d argue that as I said much earlier there is a lot of opacity in spending and money outside of campaigns. As the election draws closer there will be an increase in small and larger donations. Biden and Clinton significantly outraised Trump in 2016 and 2020. Money raised is a historically tricky measure of baseline support and turn out.

As noted ,though even with those caveats you can’t dismiss the datapoints. We have six months and a lot can change between then and now. That’s the big refrain. We have a frankly stupid amount of time and historically despite the fact that it often feels like a lot is happening, but historically this doesn’t always change very much. We have what appears to be a normal election cycle and since 2018 the Democrats have generally done better in each election then they should have from a historical trends perspective. Biden is doing better in several factors, but the President and the campaign would be fools not to take this very seriously and this will likely be a close election (not as close as 2000 but close enough).Both candidates have trouble with their coalitions and will have to figure out how to stitch together new ones, and they will both have difficulties.