Four Factors That Could Decide the 2024 Election

What to watch for in the Biden vs. Trump redux.

Editor’s note: We’re pleased to welcome back Michael Baharaeen to The Liberal Patriot newsletter as our new chief political analyst. Michael’s reporting on political history, geography, election results, demography, and voting patterns provides readers with comprehensive examinations of the most important state and national trends shaping the election cycle. Michael’s weekly column will go out on Tuesdays. Please say hello to Michael on Notes!

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(Composite by Getty Images)

And just like that, it was summer of an election year. With only five months to go until the general election (and even less than that until voters begin casting early ballots), President Biden and Donald Trump are kicking their campaigns into high gear. Much of the country will soon get its first chance to tune in in earnest when the two men face off at a debate in Georgia.

As Americans begin shifting their focus to a 2020 rematch that polls and forecasters suggest will be extremely close, it’s worth considering some variables that could tip the election one way or the other. Below are a few questions I’ll be looking for answers to in the months ahead and on election night.

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1. Do America’s educational and geographic divides deepen?

Over the past couple of decades, two fault lines have come to explain more about the country than almost anything else: place and educational status. Big metro areas that became hubs of economic growth and ingenuity attracted highly educated Americans who possessed culturally progressive values. At the same time, brain drain and population decline hurt rural areas and small towns, which led to a host of bad outcomes and left them more politically homogeneous.

As these divides have ossified, they’ve had a profound impact on our politics. Democrats have lost significant ground in rural and working-class America over the past roughly two decades, which has put erstwhile competitive states like Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, and Ohio all but out of reach for the time being. Trump’s surprisingly strong showing in 2020 was no doubt thanks to doing even better than in 2016 among non-college voters (+3 points) and rural voters (+9 points).

However, Republicans have also bled support in more moderate, well-educated suburban areas, especially during the Trump era, which has put longtime GOP states like Arizona and Georgia in play for Democrats. In 2020, Biden was the beneficiary of these changes. He outperformed Clinton among suburbanites by nine points and college graduates by four.

Whether either of these trends deepens further—or reverts—in 2020 could be pivotal in deciding the next president.

2. Can Biden outrun age concerns?

Biden’s biggest vulnerability in this election appears to be something that is outside of his control: Father Time. More precisely, it’s how voters are processing the fact that he will be 82 before he’s sworn in for a second term and 86 by the time the next president would take office. It’s the fact that even though he is only three years older than Trump, Biden presents as much frailer and less vigorous.

Polling routinely shows that most voters—including most Democrats—think Biden is simply too old to do the job. Perhaps even more concerningly, this does not appear to be an issue that voters have with Trump. A February Quinnipiac poll found that while voters thought Biden was “too old to effectively serve another 4-year term” by a margin of 67–31, it was nearly the opposite for Trump, whom voters said was not too old by a margin of 57–41 (though Trump’s margin was substantially lower than just a few months earlier). Specifically, they viewed Trump as more physically fit for the job (60–37) than Biden (35–62).¹

This isn’t a new problem for Biden either. Some Democrats pointed to this as far back as the 2020 primary campaign. But a quote from one of those Democrats at the time also signals how the age issue may be surmountable for Biden. Alan Feirer, the then-chairman of the Madison County, IA, Democratic Party, said of him, “Boy, he’s old. That shouldn’t be a problem, and you don’t like to say it, but he isn’t as compelling verbally…There is starting to be a real fear that he cannot hold his own in the debate against Donald Trump.”

So this was a concern in 2020, and Biden overcame it anyway. This of course doesn’t mean it’s not a greater—or any less legitimate—concern for voters now that he’s five years older. But despite those fears back then, many voted for him anyway. For their part, Biden and his campaign are leaning into the issue and embracing his age as a sign that he has the necessary experience to be president. He’ll also have a very low bar to clear in the upcoming debate to convince voters he is still with it. Time will tell, though, whether all this will mollify voters’ concerns and convince them to judge him on other matters.

3. How are voters thinking about the economy—and Biden’s stewardship of it?

An issue that has dogged Biden since early in his first term has been the state of the nation’s economy. Coming out of the pandemic, countries around the world dealt with problems like constricted supply-chain flow and a rising cost of living—and the U.S. was not spared.² Inflation on items ranging from gas to groceries to housing increased at a higher rate than normal over the past few years.

This reality has unsurprisingly impacted the public’s mood. From 2020 to late 2022, consumer sentiment—the measure of how consumers feel about the state of the economy and their personal financial situation—continuously declined, hitting a historic low in June 2022. These sour attitudes were then reflected in voters’ poor feelings about their leaders. Biden’s approval rating has been mired in the high-30s and low 40s for most of his presidency, and his stewardship of the economy is rated even lower.

Perhaps even more frustrating for Biden: the public’s mood has improved following stronger economic indicators around inflation, wages, GDP growth, and more—and yet he doesn’t appear to be receiving credit it for it so far.³ However, this may not ultimately matter. In the 2020 election, 28 percent of voters cited the economy as the most important issue, second only to the pandemic. Trump won these voters over Biden by an astounding 81–17 margin…but Biden won the election anyway. In 2022, nearly half of voters said the economy was the most pressing issue facing the country, but far from punishing the party in power, the Democrats found success in several key races that cycle. In fact, they notably won voters nationally who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden’s handling of the economy by 23 points.

To be sure, any incumbent president—especially one running for re-election—would want credit for a healthy economy. But Biden may still be able to prevail even if voters don’t give it to him.

4. Will Trump’s baggage finally catch up to him?

Despite Trump’s strong standing against Biden in presidential polling over the past year, it’s worth remembering just how much baggage the former president brings to this campaign. Since November 3, 2020, he plotted to overturn the results of the last election, whipped some of his supporters into a frenzy before they stormed the U.S. Capitol building, faced criminal indictments in four separate cases, and became the first president in the country’s history to be convicted of a felony.

Of course, one could look at each of these developments in the context of the current presidential polling showing a dead heat and conclude that none of this has had—or will have—an impact on his prospects this November. But there are reasons to think it might yet.

First, we have evidence that some voters’ memories of Trump’s presidency are actually a little hazy. For example, the Washington Post compared YouGov polling from October 2020 and April 2024 and found that swing state voters’ approval of Trump’s handling of the economy was far lower in the final month of his presidency than it is now.⁴ Similarly, an April New York Times/Siena survey asked voters what they remembered the most about Trump’s presidency. Only five percent of respondents said January 6, and just four percent said COVID. Overall, people tended to mainly remember his personality traits rather than any specific policy or event.

Additionally, recent polling from a project called Blueprint found that surprisingly low levels of young voters remember some of Trump’s most controversial statements from his first term, including calling war veterans “suckers” (only 35 percent had heard this) and saying Haitian immigrants to the U.S. “all have AIDS” (just 37 percent had heard). In fact, of 24 Trump statements, there were 16 that less than a majority of young people had heard of but that a majority—often a large one—disapproved of.

Trump has undoubtedly benefited from a few things during the last four years. First, because he is no longer the incumbent president, he’s also a much smaller presence in the daily lives of many Americans. In fact, greater shares have tuned out the news since he left office. And as life has moved on, people have become more focused on the problems of today—which has often come at Biden’s expense. As political scientist John Sides put it, “It’s the salience of issues today that color the memories that people have of Trump.”

However, as the election approaches and Trump becomes a daily figure in American life once more, his past may begin to catch up with him. Biden is using his massive war chest to make sure voters remember his predecessor’s baggage, with a strong emphasis in recent weeks on Trump’s felony convictions. And while it’s highly unlikely in our polarized era that we will see a massive swing against the GOP nominee, polling over the past week has indicated that the criminal conviction may be starting to move the needle against him. With five months to go, there’s plenty of time for voters to reacquaint themselves with a president only 38 percent of them approved of by the end of his last term.

Biden has plenty issues of his own, but given how much voters are dreading their choices this year, the election seems poised to become a battle over whom they simply dislike less. Despite how many political norms candidates like Trump have gotten away with breaking in recent years, some truisms likely still persist. And one of them is that you’d probably rather be the candidate who isn’t running with a felony conviction on his record.

1. A slim majority (51–48) said Trump was not mentally fit to be president.

2. Though it’s worth noting that inflation in the U.S. has notably not been as bad as it has in much of the rest of the developed world and the country has rebounded in key ways much more quickly than many others.

3. It’s worth remembering a longtime political truism: presidents tend to receive too much blame for a bad economy—and too much credit for a healthy one.

4. Though the economy is generally considered more of an albatross for Biden than Trump, it nonetheless offers a sign that time and distance from Trump’s presidency have changed how some people remember it.