Donald Trump Has a Better Chance of Winning against Joe Biden in 2024 than He Had in 2020

Normally it would be foolish to attempt to unseat a politician by setting him up against the opponent he most recently defeated, but the unusual way Joe Biden achieved victory in 2020 makes nominating Donald Trump again in 2024 a plausible strategy for the Republicans.

It was unusual that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election because he ran on a lack of negatives rather than on any positives, as “not Trump” rather than as “Joe Biden.” This strategy usually fails, as it did in 2012 when Mitt Romney ran as “not Obama.”

The reason this strategy worked for Biden is that at the time of his election the media had been directing a terrorist campaign against his opponent’s supporters for six years, stretching from when it first urged everyone to “punch a Nazi” to when it fomented the racist “Black Lives Matter” riots.

A common explanation for Biden’s 2020 win is that people just wanted to “return to normalcy” after the madness of the Trump years. This is true, but not in the sense that is usually intended. Just as people did not suffer primarily due to COVID, but due to the forced confinement that statists used COVID to rationalize, so people were not weary primarily of Trump, but of the hysteria, lies, and terrorism that were the left’s response to his entry into politics.

Nonetheless, this response did intimidate the public out of re-electing him. One of the reasons we can be confident of this is that it is abnormal for an incumbent to lose, partly because of the advantages his incumbency confers.

One of these advantages is greater attention from the media, but this is only beneficial when a politician has won his seat by advertising himself, not by hiding from voters, which is how Joe Biden won. If attention benefited him, then he would not have avoided it, and so what usually constitutes an incumbency advantage is actually a disadvantage in his case.

As a candidate, Joe Biden could hide, but as the president, he cannot. Now that the public has gotten a better look at him than it ever got during his 2020 campaign, it might decide to elect Donald Trump instead.