Like Ronald Reagan in 1980, former President Donald Trump often asks a question on the campaign trail: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
Unlike Reagan 44 years ago, Trump is posing this as someone who has already served a term in the White House. It fits in with another of his campaign slogans: President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris broke it, Trump will fix it.
The line drives Democrats crazy. Exactly four years ago, the country was suffering through a pandemic. Trump’s management of COVID-19 and the economic impact of various virus mitigation efforts cost him a second consecutive term, but now he is back and possibly on the cusp of returning to the Oval Office for four more years.
Elections are about the future, not the past. But whether Trump or Harris wins will affect how voters remember 2020 years from now. The chaotic summer of George Floyd protests, violent crime, and COVID-19 lockdowns are increasingly associated with the Left, even if Trump was president at the time. The pre-pandemic economy and relative international calm are associated with Trump.
PATHS TO VICTORY FOR HARRIS AND TRUMP IN 2024
If this is how a plurality of voters feel on Election Day, it could be the difference-maker. Trump’s retrospective job approval ratings in many polls are higher than they were for most or all of his four years in office. They are also higher than Biden’s right now and much higher than the percentage saying the country is moving in the right direction.
For most of Trump’s term, the economy was growing and unemployment was low, and so was inflation. There were no wars in Ukraine or Gaza. There was no border crisis. It is difficult for Democrats to run against Trump presiding over high federal spending, school and business closures, and other policies related to the pandemic because they were more supportive of them than he was.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) tried to run to the right of Trump on the pandemic response in the Republican primaries. DeSantis’s rejection of the Anthony Fauci approach to COVID is a big part of how he became such an important national figure. But GOP primary voters had largely moved on by 2024.
A Trump win this year would also make the 2020 election results seem like an anomalous event, a speed bump on the road to a more populist GOP. If Harris beats Trump, he will be a twice-defeated presidential candidate whose defeat of a flawed Hillary Clinton will look flukey and whose remake of the party will be sharply contested in the 2026 and 2028 elections.
The story that Harris wants to tell is that she and Biden took office amid the wreckage of Trump’s tumultuous first term and cleaned up the former president’s mess. Democrats had hoped that message would be even easier to send in the aftermath of Jan. 6, a second impeachment, several indictments, and a New York conviction on 34 felony counts.
Instead, Trump and Harris enter Election Day tied in the national RealClearPolitics polling average. The former president is given slightly better than even odds in the Electoral College. And it took Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee to keep Trump from having a bigger advantage. Trump was clearly winning his rematch with Biden.
It is possible that Trump has stepped on the nostalgia with his wild Madison Square Garden rally and other last-minute reminders of the excesses many voters find offensive. Harris has leaned heavily on presenting Trump as unstable, unhinged, and dictatorial in the final weeks of the campaign.
Democrats would still like the election to be a referendum on Trump, while Republicans would prefer voters render their verdict on Biden and Harris. A Biden-Harris versus Trump binary choice is not as clear-cut a positive for Democrats as it seemed to be even in the 2022 midterm elections.
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For the first time since former President Grover Cleveland won his rematch with then-President Benjamin Harrison in 1892, the general election largely hinges on a comparison of two administrations’ records. Trump is looking to become the first president since Cleveland and only the second in history to serve nonconsecutive terms. Harris would make history as the first woman president, an achievement Trump denied Clinton in 2016.
But an election about the next four years will go a long way to defining the last eight as well.
