We’re now six months from Election Day, and I’m constantly reminding myself just how strange things are this year. At a surface level this is obvious. We’ve never had an election where the results will determine if we get to have another election.
Scratch that surface and you’ll find the strangeness runs deep. Strategically, tactically, atmospherically—regardless of how you look at it, the 2024 campaign does not feel like or resemble any of its predecessors.
In May of any other election year, with primaries settled and nominees established, the fall campaigns would be springing to life. We would be watching the soon to be anointed standard-bearers spar with each other as they test their fall messaging. There would be a sense of excitement and anticipation with talk of running-mates, convention plans, and general election strategies designed to broaden coalitions.
We would be entering the summer season where the nominees are crowned amidst meaningless pageantry and we would begin to weigh the prospect of a novice challenger standing behind the podium with the presidential seal. How will the challenger—or challengers if it’s an open seat—present themselves to the country? Do they measure up to our requirements? Can we picture them in the White House?
May is all about potential, with the two candidates standing after a long primary campaign taking their best shot at the prize.
That’s not happening this year.
The 2024 campaign feels like a trial to be endured rather than a source of renewal. The usual campaign benchmarks are muted. Thoughts of acceptance speeches and running-mate choices that normally start generating excitement in May have not brought much suspense. The prospect of sitting through three fall debates—if they even happen—seems like an endurance test.
Things look strange when you zoom out
From a wide-angle perspective, the strangeness of 2024 begins with its origin story.
Defeated incumbents who cost their party full control of the federal government are political lepers. Their portraits are banished at party headquarters and they are not invited to the next nominating convention. Yet here is Donald Trump inverting that history, taking full control of the Republican party and banishing anyone who is not loyal to him.
The durability of MAGA as a political force is responsible for the peculiar dynamic of the 2024 campaign. It assured Trump’s re-nomination despite the destruction he has caused his party, which assured Biden—the only person to have defeated him—would seek a second term with the full support of his party.
We are locked in a time warp, destined to repeat the past, because the seismic changes in our country that ignited a reactionary resistance movement need more time to play out.
The 2024 campaign feels like a trial to be endured rather than a source of renewal.
This has led to other peculiarities.
Using the measures historians employ to assess presidential performance, Biden has been an unusually successful president, yet you wouldn’t know it by looking at his job approval scores. He has fulfilled his core campaign promise of getting us through Covid and restoring normalcy to our lives. His legislative record would be the envy of every president since LBJ. He has regenerated global alliances. By every key statistical measure, the American economy is the strongest in the world.
Yet he is locked in a coin flip election with an opponent who is spending his days dozing off in criminal court while a team of lawyers run obstruction campaigns to prevent him from being brought to justice in three other jurisdictions. In that trial, he has had to acknowledge an affair with Stormy Daniels that happened when his newborn son was a few months old. That alone would have been disqualifying in an earlier time.
Under ordinary circumstances, it is highly unlikely that an 81-year-old incumbent would have sought a second term—or a first term for that matter back when he was only 77. Biden ran to dislodge the MAGA threat, and he’s doing it again. But it’s also the case that under ordinary circumstances, an incumbent with Biden’s record would be coasting to re-election.
Instead, more people credit the guy who presided over the Covid collapse with being better suited to manage the economy than the guy who presided over the longest period of full employment since the 1960s.
This should change as more people start tuning into the election if the Biden campaign can effectively communicate its message. But nothing resembling a Reaganesque landslide is in the cards. We are too polarized for that.
The 2024 campaign is trench warfare, and it feels like it.
Things look strange when you zoom in
At a micro level, 2024 looks just as odd.
Possibly even more odd.
By conventional measures, Donald Trump’s campaign doesn’t make much sense. He isn’t building staff in key states. He’s siphoning campaign contributions to offset his massive legal fees. He’s running on a deeply unpopular platform and making a point of how he wants to use power to take revenge on his opponents.
Meanwhile, Biden is doing all the typical things that presidential campaigns do, but his campaign still feels distorted because he’s operating in this strange Trump-induced reality. So while Biden engages in small and large-dollar fundraising efforts, holds campaign events, runs ads, and takes positions that align with large segments of the public, he is playing on an asymmetric field where the other side is running to establish permanent minority rule.
Perhaps the most telling comment about what Trump is doing came from his daughter-in-law, now one of the chairs of the RNC, who announced in April that the party is investing not in field offices or voter mobilization but “election integrity” efforts:
The RNC is hiring hundreds of election integrity staff across the map—more than ever before because our Party will be recruiting thousands of more observers to protect the vote in 2024. These campaign officials in states are tasked with recruiting, training, and when possible, shifting poll watchers and poll workers day in and day out.
Recruiting and training? Poll watchers? With no history of widespread voter fraud in America and given what happened in 2020, it’s not a stretch to see how an effort like this is being designed with an eye toward disrupting and discrediting the election.
That would bring everything else Trump is doing into focus. If his vision of a second term is anti-democratic, it stands to reason that he would take a loose view of the democratic means for getting there.
The strangest thing about the 2024 election is that the election itself may not be the main event.
Biden’s organizational, fundraising, messaging, and tactical superiority could and should prove decisive in the end. But if the election is close it won’t actually be the end.
If it feels like we’re just going through the paces of the 2024 campaign, that may be because we are grudgingly tolerating the formalities until the real action starts in November, December, and January. There could be turmoil ahead before this is resolved.
If that’s the case, May can bring us hope through perspective. Perhaps it isn’t the usual hope for renewal that a presidential campaign can generate, but it is something appropriate for this precarious moment.
It is the awareness that by concentrating on strong-arming his way back to power, Trump is conceding the fundamentals of the election to Biden, who can convert that advantage into a large enough victory to prevent Trump from succeeding at overturning the result.
The goal of the broader pro-democracy coalition this spring and summer should be to make that comfortable victory happen. The tools we need to get out of this time warp are in our hands.
None of this is normal. It can be enervating. But it is the challenge of our time.
The way to prevent a dangerous post-election period is through vigilance now, while this strange campaign still has six months to run.