IDEAS The 2024 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet

Lee Drutman was quoted in a Vigour Times article about the two-party system and the 2024 presidential elections.

Americans hate—or claim to hate—their politicians, but even by those standards, the early shape of the 2024 presidential race is a little bizarre. More than 20 months out from the election, Americans consistently say they don’t want to see a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And yet the most likely outcome today is a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

As Biden’s political fortunes have risen since late 2022, Democratic elected officials have slowly come around to the idea that he’s likely to be the nominee again next year, but Democratic voters remain skeptical, as I wrote recently. Still, they’re likely to get Biden, thanks in part to the advantage of incumbency.

On the Republican side, Trump looks weaker than he has at any time since shortly after he entered the 2016 race. His overall favorability is low, but that’s not new—he’s never won the national popular vote, and many of his chosen candidates have lost. More worryingly from the Mar-a-Lago point of view, a good chunk of Republicans now seem ready to move on from Trump, and he hasn’t managed to clear the field of rivals. Nikki Haley, who vowed not to run if he did, changed her mind. Ron DeSantis has not declared but seems sure to, and poses a larger electoral threat. Yet Trump still manages to top primary polls with a plurality of support.

How did we end up in such a situation? What in the structure of contemporary American politics led us to the cusp of a clash of meh? One easy answer is incumbency. Not since fellow Democrat Franklin Pierce in 1852, when Biden was just a wee lad, has a sitting president lost his party’s nomination. (That’s a joke, by the way.) Trump is not in office, but he is a sort of demi-incumbent as the most recent Republican president, a status he has reinforced with his false claims that he actually won in 2020.

Political scientists I asked about this offered a couple of additional, nuanced views. Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America, told me that the increased ideological unity within each of the two parties might explain the rise of unpopular standard-bearers. For most of U.S. history, the parties were a little more mixed, and a large portion of affiliated voters might still consider voting for a candidate of the other party.

“That kept it so both parties would nominate candidates that were broadly appealing to a larger swath of the country,” he said. Now the real prize is to win the primary, because once you’re the nominee, the party will coalesce around you, no matter what—a point that Trump 2016 and Biden 2020 both proved. “As the parties have polarized and separated, what’s happened is that while the parties remain internally fractious, what unites them more than ever is hatred of the other party.”