Incumbent Presidents Are Tough to Beat

Presidents who want a second term generally get it. Since the Civil War, only seven elected presidents who tried to be reelected failed to win a second term: Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Does this tell us anything about Joe Biden's chances? Maybe, if we examine why the Unlucky Seven lost.

Cleveland was an anomaly to start with. In the late 19th century, politics split along the Mason-Dixon line, with the South overwhelmingly Democratic and the North primarily Republican (yup, really). Cleveland, who was from upstate New York, was the only Democratic president from 1860 to 1912. And just barely, as he beat James G. Blaine (R), the continental liar from the state of Maine, in 1884 by only 0.5% of the popular vote and only 37 electoral votes (in part because the Republican Mugwumps abandoned Blaine because he was corrupt). In 1888, Cleveland lost to Benjamin Harrison, restoring the normal pattern of Republican domination.

Harrison himself wasn't reelected in 1892, in part due to the candidacy of Populist James Weaver, who got 9% of the vote and won the typically Republican states of Nevada, Colorado, and Kansas as well as the new states of Idaho and North Dakota, which otherwise would have gone to Harrison.

In 1912, William Howard Taft failed to be reelected because he was challenged by his popular predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt. Taft and Roosevelt combined got 50.6% of the popular vote to Woodrow Wilson's 41.8%, but the Republican split allowed Wilson to get the most votes in 40 states and thus all their electoral votes. So two of the seven times a post-Civil War incumbent lost was due to a serious third-party challenger who sucked off many of the president's supporters. Now that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has opted out of the 2024 race, the chances of a split of the Democratic vote defeating Biden is very unlikely.

Now we come to the next three: Hoover, Carter, and Bush. All were victims of a recession or worse. Hoover, of course, ran during the Great Depression in 1932 and the voters wanted a new deal so they voted for the New Deal. Carter and Bush were unfortunate enough to preside over garden-variety recessions over which they had little control, but the voters tend to blame the president for a recession anyway.

We doubt that we have to explain the 2020 election to you. Suffice it to say that Donald Trump was exceptionally unpopular with 80 million Americans. The final blow, in his case, was not a recession, it was his handling of the COVID pandemic (which, of course, had an economic downturn as a major component).

Historical evidence thus suggests it takes unusual events or a serious recession to unseat an incumbent president who wants a second term. But even if there is a recession in 2024, that doesn't mean Biden is toast. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama all had recessions during their first terms and still were reelected. The timing of the recession is important. If it is over by Election Day, the president can claim he conquered it. Of course, inflation is as bad—maybe worse—for a president. But voters have short memories. If inflation has been beaten back by Labor Day 2024, it probably won't hurt Biden.

A lot has been made of Biden's low job approval rating, around 43%, but that is not predictive of anything this early in the cycle. Bill Clinton was at 39% in his second year and still was reelected. Ronald Reagan dropped as low as 35% in his first term and was still reelected. Also, Biden's likely opponent, Trump, is even less popular. It wouldn't be the first time the lesser of two evils won an election.

Of course, history is only a guide. There could be unique issues in 2024 that haven't played a role before. Two that come to mind are Biden's age (currently 80) and abortion. One works against Biden and one works for him. We don't know how they will play out, but is it likely that millions of the 81 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 are going to say: "Biden is too old so I am voting Republican this time," especially when his probable opponent is only 3½ years younger? Of course, with Biden vs. the 44-year-old Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), the calculus changes.

But let's look at the age issue more closely. It is not the age, per se, that is the issue. Age is a really a proxy for health, so the question is: "Will someone in his 80s be healthy enough to handle the toughest and most stressful job in the world?" Woodrow Wilson had a stroke at 63 that incapacitated him. Had there been a Twenty-Fifth Amendment at the time, it would surely have been invoked. FDR, then 62, did not even attend his own nominating convention in Chicago in 1944 due to poor health. His inaugural speech in 1945 was only 556 words, the shortest since George Washington's, and lasted only 12 minutes because he couldn't manage any more. Ronald Reagan probably had early Alzheimer's disease in his 70s. Barring an unexpected health event, Biden is likely to be healthier on Election Day at 81 than Wilson was at 63, FDR was at 62, and Reagan was in his 70s. Age isn't everything, but Biden will have to convince people he is up to the job, particularly if his opponent is DeSantis or someone else who is under 70. (V)

Does Biden's Age Give Him an Advantage?

Let's keep going on this subject a bit more. There have been endless stories about "Joe Biden is too old," but a closer look at the data reveals something interesting. Recent polls have shown among younger voters (under 30), Biden's approval rating is 38%, despite that cohort being strongly Democratic. But polls have also shown that among seniors (65+) it is 49%, about 5 points above his overall approval rating. And remember, seniors tend to vote for Republicans.

Also note that seniors are the most reliable voters. In 2020, 72% of eligible seniors voted vs. 48% of under 25s. Put in other words, despite all the stories about "Biden is too old," high-turnout seniors, who normally vote Republican, like him. That's not such a bad place to be, really. Here are the data since 1964. They are pretty consistent.

Going back to 1975, only three Democratic presidential candidates have carried the senior vote (Bill Clinton twice and Al Gore once). Since 2000, no Democratic candidate has won seniors. In 2020, different surveys showed that Trump beat Biden by somewhere in the range of 3-7 points among seniors. If that group splits evenly now that will help Biden.

Also potentially helpful to Biden is that the size of the senior cohort is growing. In 2010, only 13% of the population was 65 or more. In 2020, that was 17%. So not only are there more seniors than there used to be, and not only do they turn out to vote at higher rates than any other age group, but they look increasingly favorably at old candidates. Here are how many votes each of five age groups cast in 2020. As you can see, seniors cast about a quarter of the total votes despite being only 17% of the population (due to their high turnout rate):

Cohort	Votes	Pct.
18-24	13,752,000	9%
25-34	24,091,000	16%
35-44	23,421,000	15%
45-64	53,646,000	35%
≥65	39,718,000	26%

All the talk about "Biden is too old" probably rubs a lot of 65+ voters the wrong way. Some of them are invalids and feel really old, but others are out golfing, playing pickle ball, traveling, and engaging in other activities, and don't at all like the idea that once you are 80, you are feeble and useless. Republicans are expected to run many ads this cycle about how old Biden is, but they should be careful about that. Annoying a large cohort that has a very good voting record and is expected to cast over a quarter of the total votes may not be a smart move. (V)

Welcome to 2016

The 2016 Republican primaries were characterized by a large field of well-known and less well-known politicians attacking each other in the hopes of knocking off all the others so it would become a two-person race: them vs. Donald Trump. That didn't work out so well for them.

Now there are signs of a repeat performance. A super PAC aligned with Ron DeSantis is now running an ad attacking... Nikki Haley, of all people, despite her being down in the weeds in all polls. The super PAC, called Never Back Down, has accused her of auditioning to be Trump's running mate. You can't make this stuff up. She is not a fire-breathing election denier and has no chance at being Trump's running mate, although conceivably she could be DeSantis'. If Trump is the nominee and wants a female running mate, our guess is that Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD), who is definitely auditioning for the job, will be much higher on the list than Haley.

But why is the super PAC attacking Haley instead of Trump? The answer is probably that DeSantis has fallen so far in the polls that he is getting close to the rest of the pack—Haley, Mike Pence, Tim Scott, Asa Hutchinson, and a bunch of total unknowns. That's not where DeSantis expected to be. He thought he would go man-to-man with Trump and now he's down in the weeds with the also-rans. If he is not careful, he could end up in third or fourth place one of these days. So he has to knock out the other minor players first so then it will be choice between him and Trump.

This is exactly the 2016 scenario, when all the not-Trump candidates battled each other and not Trump. The result was they mangled one another and Trump escaped unscathed. They apparently don't see that they are just rerunning the 2016 scenario, most likely with the same result.

Why is the super PAC going after Haley rather than, say, Pence or Scott? And why now? Haley had the audacity to take a potshot at DeSantis for his attitude toward the Walt Disney Corporation. She even invited the company to move north and set up shop in South Carlina. DeSantis apparently didn't like that, even though it would cost the company billions to relocate. The anti-Haley ad included a poll asking whether she should be nicknamed Mickey Haley or Nikki Mouse.

What is interesting here is that DeSantis is looking for a nickname for Haley. Welcome to the third grade playground. Grown-ups don't do this kind of stuff. DeSantis thinks that by mimicking Trump, voters will love him. He's almost certainly wrong. People who like Trump are going to vote for the real thing, not a Mickey Mouse imitation. People who don't like the real thing are going to look elsewhere (Hutchinson? Chris Christie or Chris Sununu if they jump in?)

Curt Anderson, a veteran Republican strategist, summed up DeSantis' ploy: "Attacking candidates with no votes does not have the upside of gaining votes." (V)

North Carolina Supreme Court Approves Gerrymandering

Last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that gerrymandering violated the state Constitution. On Friday, it ruled that gerrymandering does not violate the state Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court at least had the decency to wait 50 years before saying that its ruling in Roe v. Wade was wrong. How come the North Carolina Court changed its mind in only 1 year?

It's pretty simple. The old ruling was 4-3. As a result of the November elections, there is now a 5-2 Republican majority on the Court. So naturally it voted 5-2 along party lines to allow gerrymandering. The courts are now a political arm of the government in many cases, just like the other two branches, and all that matters is how many votes you have. Sorry to disillusion you if you thought otherwise.

Former AG Eric Holder denounced the ruling as a nakedly political exercise. He said: "This shameful, delegitimizing decision to allow the unjust, blatant manipulation of North Carolina's voting districts was not a function of legal principle, it was a function of political personnel and partisan opportunism. Neither the map nor the law have changed since last year's landmark rulings—only the makeup of the majority of the North Carolina Supreme Court has changed."

The North Carolina legislature will now immediately crank up Dave's redistricting website and get to work. They can probably net at least four seats doing so. That might be enough to maintain control of the House in Jan. 2025, even if Democrats win most of the highly competitive districts in New York and California in 2024.

And just in case you thought Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) could prevent a new and radically gerrymandered map, sorry. North Carolina law does not allow the governor to veto political maps. The legislature has full control of the process.

While the Court was at it, it also reversed a lower court ruling that decreed that felons could vote. Now they can't anymore. No Republicans will shed a tear over that.

If the North Carolina legislature draws a heavily gerrymandered map, that could have ramifications further north. The New York legislature drew a highly partisan map after the 2020 census, but the state Court of Appeals struck it down. Since then, there has been a change in the composition of the state Court of Appeals (the highest court in New York), and the new court is probably more favorable to accepting a gerrymander than the old one was. It is hard to imagine New York legislators sitting around and watching their North Carolina colleagues grab four House seats and not trying to do the same thing, now that it might work.

But there is more. After the former North Carolina Supreme Court outlawed gerrymandering, Republican leaders in the state legislature sued. The case, Moore v. Harper, had oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court last year. The legislators advanced a theory claiming that state legislatures have the sole right to draw political maps and that governors may not veto them in any state and no state courts can overrule the maps. This is known as the "Independent State Legislature" theory. The suit could be withdrawn now or the Supreme Court could dismiss the case now. Or maybe not. The U.S. Supreme Court obviously has not had the time yet to decide what comes next. (V)

House Democratic Primary in NY-17 Could Be Brutal

House district NY-17 contains all of Westchester County north of White Plains, plus all of Putnam and Rockland Counties. It had been Democratic for years until Jan. 2023. In 2022, former Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D), who had represented NY-18, just to the north, decided to move south and run in NY-17 because redistricting made NY-17 an easier win than NY-18. This move was a real bummer for then-Rep. Mondaire Jones (D) who looked like he was going to face a nasty primary with Maloney. To make it worse, Maloney was chairman of the DCCC, so he had access to plenty of money to spend on his own race. Jones saw the handwriting on the wall, so he moved to NY-10, which covers parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Unfortunately for him, also in that race was Dan Goldman (D), an up-and-coming wealthy lawyer who was the lead counsel in Donald Trump's first impeachment and a hero to many Democrats. Goldman narrowly won the primary and then went on to win the general election with 84% of the vote. Meanwhile, up in NY-17, all of the DCCC's cash couldn't save Maloney. He lost to now-Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) in a district that Joe Biden won by 10 points.

Naturally, Jones is not happy about all this maneuvering. Now he has moved to Sleepy Hollow, of headless horseman fame, and is expected to run for Congress in 2024 in NY-17, his old district. So far, so good.

Now here's the rub. NY-17 is a slightly Democratic district (D+3), so other Democrats have the same idea. In particular, a person named Liz Whitmer Gereghty has already filed to run there. You may not know much about the Gereghtys, but if you guessed that Liz is the sister of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), you'd be right (advice to Liz: drop the Gereghty; some people won't vote for someone whose name they can't spell or pronounce). Sis is a rising star in the Democratic Party and a potential 2028 presidential candidate. So if Jones, who is Black, jumps in there will be nasty primary between a Black star and a white-star-adjacent candidate in a winnable district that Biden won easily. Maloney might also try again. It will get ugly.

Gereghty has lived in lower Westchester for 20 years and serves on a local school board. She has deep roots in the district whereas Jones appears to be jumping around looking for an easy win somewhere. Even fellow progressives are worried about Jones, since winning the district is crucial to the Democrats' hopes of recapturing the House in 2024. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), an ideological ally of Jones, has said she doesn't want to get involved this early. That is different from urging Jones to jump in. She obviously also knows that Gereghty, who is more moderate than Jones, is probably a better fit to a swing district like this one. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus' political arm, also hasn't encouraged Jones to go for it.

A contest between Gereghty and Jones would force Democrats to choose between the center and getting more progressives to vote. Jones' advantage is that he has already served in Congress and has the support of many progressives and Black voters. Gereghty would get support (including access to donors) from the Michigan delegation (especially Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-MI, with whom she is close) and from womens' groups that want to see more women in Congress. Due to the proximity to a huge media market and the very real possibility of flipping a seat from red to blue, this race is going to get a massive amount of attention and money. (V)

Democrats Are Starting to Target the 18 "Biden Republicans" in the House

There are 18 House Republicans currently sitting in districts that Joe Biden won in 2020. NY-17 (above) is just one of them, but that race is going to be so high profile and so close to the media world in New York City that it rates its own section today. After all, any reporter in NYC can go to Grand Central Terminal, get on a Metro North express train, and be in Valhalla in the district in 44 minutes to talk to the locals, all for $11.25. Many will be tempted.

The other 17 "Biden districts" will also be highly competitive, although the DCCC hopes to be able to avoid nasty primaries like NY-17 will probably have. Democratic operatives all know that these races will probably determine control of the House this cycle. However, some of the incumbents are less vulnerable than others. For example, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) is in a strong position to hold on in PA-01 (EVEN) but "George Santos" in NY-03 (D+2) is a dead man walking. Democratic strategists think that 14 to 16 of the 18 districts might be winnable with the right candidate and some luck.

The process of winnowing the races and prioritizing them has already begun. Swing Left, a grassroots progressive group of activists and donors, has announced its list of initial targets. Sorted by the 2022 margin, they are:

District	PVI	2022 Margin	Incumbent	2022 Democrat
CA-13	D+4	0.4%	John Duarte	Adam Gray
NY-17	D+3	0.6%	Michael Lawler	Sean Patrick Maloney
OR-05	D+2	2.1%	Lori Chavez-DeRemer	Jamie McLeod Skinner
NY-04	D+5	3.6%	Anthony D'Esposito	Laura Gillen
CA-27	D+4	6.4%	Mike Garcia	Christy Smith
NY-03	D+2	7.6%	"George Santos"	Rob Zimmerman

Although it is a bit early in the cycle, Swing Left has donors and volunteers ready to go. The group thinks that starting to take down the incumbents now will have benefits later on. They also think that all that is needed is a decent Democrat who runs a good campaign because they expect all the races to be nationalized and donors from all over the country will contribute. Having spectacular candidates isn't required, just good ones.

In some districts, strong candidates have already announced. In CA-27, George Whitesides (D), a former Virgin Galactic CEO who can self-fund, is already in. In NY-03, Tom Suozzi (D) used to hold the seat but left to run for governor. He might come back, in which case "George Santos" will be sent packing.

Swing Left is not the only group going after the "Biden 18." The recent vote on the debt ceiling bill is going to come back and haunt them. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said: "We are not surprised that so-called Republican moderates, who talk a good game, but at the end of the day always, always, always vote with the extremists. They are going to have to answer for their hypocrisy."

A super PAC affiliated with the House Democrats is already running a television ad accusing the Republicans of threatening to default on the national debt or wildly slash things Americans care about. It is clear already that the Biden 18 are going to be hit over and over on this vote. (V)

How Will Artificial Intelligence Affect the 2024 Elections?

AI has been around since a workshop at Dartmouth in 1956, but it has only hit the mainstream in the past year. In a big way. And it is going to hit the 2024 elections in an even bigger way.

Some of it is innocuous and some is not. For example, AI is going through big data to identify potential donors and voters so they can be approached for donations and votes, respectively. People could do this work as well, but computers can now do it more efficiently and with little human labor. Campaigns are also deploying AI to extract useful clips from long videos. Again, people could do this too, so it is just a labor-saving tool.

The next step up are things like writing candidate biographies and campaign literature. One Democratic pollster said that ChatGPT wrote him a biography of a gubernatorial candidate in a few seconds that would have taken him 45 minutes.

Now what about this?

This is a video produced by the RNC in honor of Joe Biden's announcement that he is running. All the images were produced by AI software. They are not actual photos that some staffer edited in Photoshop. They are completely new and fake. Generating fake images and fake audios and fake videos is a whole new ballgame compared to merely saving staffers some time.

Here is a famous example of a deepfake video from 5 years ago and the technology has gotten much better since then. If you have a history of trusting your own eyes and ears, we suggest you watch this one all the way through:

Multiple companies, including Midjourney and OpenAI, are offering services to make complete fake photos based on a few user-supplied keywords. They are already so good that they can pass an updated version of the Turing test, a test designed by computer pioneer Alan Turing to see if a machine exhibits intelligent behavior.

What happens when an unethical campaign makes a video of their opponent saying all kinds of outrageous things that the candidate supposedly said and uses the fake video in television and online ads? How about a RNC-sponsored ad showing Joe Biden "announcing" that in his second term he will order the FBI to go out and search everyone's house for guns, confiscate them all, and fine the guns' owners $10,000 per gun found? How would this affect Republican turnout? The DNC could make an ad just as inflammatory, for example having Donald Trump "announce" that he will suspend the Constitution, cancel the 2028 election, and be president for life, but it is not their style. Let your imagination run wild here—because campaign strategists are letting theirs run wild. (V)

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