What Can Biden Do?

With President Biden having fallen behind Donald Trump in the early 2024 polls, Trump’s strategy seems fairly straightforward: more of the same. Trump will portray Biden as old, inflation as high, immigration as out of control and the nation as weak. All these arguments play into the concerns of many voters.

But what might Biden do to improve his position over the next year? Today’s newsletter looks at four possibilities.

1. The ‘anti-MAGA majority’

Since Trump took office in 2017, the Republican Party has struggled nationally. In 2018, it lost control of the House. In 2020, Trump lost his re-election bid. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats did better than expected.

Michael Podhorzer, a political analyst and a former A.F.L.-C.I.O. official, argues that this pattern stems from the emergence of “an anti-MAGA majority.” Americans under 30, for example, have been voting at higher rates since 2016, partly because of their opposition to Trump, Podhorzer notes. Other analysts have pointed to suburban voters who are turned off by Trump’s attacks on democracy. This pattern helps explain why Trump-endorsed candidates in swing states like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania did so poorly in the 2022 midterms.

Today, Trump is leading in most swing states, according to the latest Times/Siena College poll. Once the campaign picks up, though, Trump’s behavior will get more attention, partly because some of his criminal trials will likely have begun. In the Times poll, about 6 percent of voters in battleground states — enough to swing the result — said they would abandon their support for Trump if he were convicted on charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and sentenced to prison.

2. The Roe factor

Another cause of Democrats’ recent election wins is the unpopularity of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. That ruling has allowed Republicans to nearly ban abortion in many states, and most voters oppose those bans.

I do think Democrats sometimes exaggerate the political impact of abortion. In 2022, many Democratic candidates tried to beat Republican incumbents by emphasizing the issue. In red states like Florida and Texas, the strategy generally failed — a sign that most Americans don’t vote based on only one issue.

That said, in swing states like Michigan, the Republican Party’s extreme abortion position did apparently influence enough voters to decide some close elections last year. And Biden needs to win states like Michigan, not red states, to be re-elected.

Perhaps Biden’s biggest advantage is that he could overtake Trump simply by winning back disaffected voters who normally support Democrats, as my colleague Nate Cohn explained in yesterday’s newsletter. Beyond abortion, a populist campaign — emphasizing the low taxes that many rich people pay — might also help Biden, given that many disaffected Democrats have modest incomes, Nate says.

3. Issue weaknesses

A pound of bacon costs an average of $7.08 in the U.S., 21 percent more than when Biden took office. The price of coffee beans has risen 33 percent. A gallon of gas is 72 percent more expensive. And because inflation affects everyone, it can damage the public mood more than almost anything else. (Yes, inflation has fallen sharply this year, but most prices have not fallen. Only their rate of increase has.)

A president can’t do much to bring down prices in the short term, yet Biden has taken steps to reduce energy prices. He approved an enormous new oil project on federal land in Alaska, while enacting billions of dollars of subsidies for clean energy. He is pursuing the sort of all-of-the-above energy policy that many Americans favor.

But he has been strangely unwilling to brag about the Alaska project, as Matthew Yglesias noted in a recent Substack newsletter. Biden seems more focused on avoiding criticism from climate activists than on winning over swing voters who can help re-elect arguably the most climate-friendly president ever.

There is a similar dynamic on immigration. Undocumented migration to the U.S. surged after Biden took office, partly in response to his welcoming campaign rhetoric, and many Americans are unhappy about the surge. Although Biden has since taken steps to reduce the surge, he rarely emphasizes these popular steps. Again, he seems more focused on progressive activists than on swing voters.

Immigration is indeed a problem for his campaign. In the Times poll, 53 percent of voters in battleground states said they trust Trump to do a better job on the issue, compared with 41 percent who trust Biden. When respondents were asked if they supported building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, 53 percent said yes.

4. The age problem

Another major concern among voters is Biden’s age. He can’t make himself younger, but he could spend more time in public, demonstrating his energy and engagement. Instead, his staff has kept him cloistered and fed impressions that he isn’t up for the job, as Maureen Dowd, the Times Opinion columnist, has written: “There’s something poignant about watching a guy who used to delight in his Irish gift of gab be muzzled.”

Of course, there is one other potential strategy for Democrats who are panicked about a second Trump presidency. Other Democrats could challenge Biden for the nomination. Time is running out, though. The deadlines for getting on the ballot in seven early primary states, including California and Florida, arrive this month.

More on 2024

• “We’ll win in 2024 by putting our heads down”: The Biden campaign shrugged off the results of the Times/Siena College Poll.

• Some Democrats expressed anxiety about the poll. “No one is going to have a runaway election here,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

• Trump’s support has surged among Black men. Overall, about 20 percent of Black voters say they would back him over Biden.

• Biden is struggling with young voters and those concerned about the economy, Politico writes.

• Have a question about the Times poll? Ask it here and our reporters will answer.

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