The 2024 presidential election has been stable to a frustrating degree. When FiveThirtyEight unveiled its national polling tracker on March 1, it showed Donald Trump with a narrow advantage over President Joe Biden. In the 11 weeks that followed, the numbers inched a little — a fraction of a percentage here, a fraction of a percentage there — but for the most part, effectively nothing has changed in nearly three months.
The good news for Democrats is that the former president’s lead hasn’t gotten bigger. The bad news for Democrats is that they hoped Trump’s advantage would disappear altogether.
After all, in recent months, not only has the Republican’s criminal trial begun, and Trump has been held in criminal contempt as salacious details about his alleged misconduct have come to the fore. It was against this backdrop that Biden’s re-election campaign has touted its accomplishments and invested heavily in positive advertising.
And yet, the aforementioned FiveThirtyEight polling tracker shows the Democratic incumbent’s deficit going from two points in early March to one point in mid-May.
Why did Team Biden surprise much of the political world yesterday by announcing new plan for this year’s presidential debates? Because as a New York Times report noted, the president and his aides decided it was time to give the 2024 contest a jolt.
So on Wednesday, the one weekday Mr. Trump is not confined to a courtroom, the Biden campaign shook up the race, publicly offering to bring forward the first presidential debate by three months. The move was meant to jolt Americans to attention sooner than later about their consequential choice in 2024. Mr. Biden’s advisers have long believed that the dawning realization of a Trump-Biden rematch will be a balm for the president’s droopy approval ratings.
That last point might seem implausible. Team Biden believes the president’s subpar approval ratings will be pushed aside once voters come to the “realization” that he’s facing Trump in the fall? Hasn’t this been clear to everyone for a while?
The answer is, not really.
My friend and former boss Paul Glastris, the editor in chief of The Washington Monthly, noted this morning that many voters “still don’t know Trump is the nominee.” Paul added that a June debate “will clarify that early, probably to Biden’s advantage.”
I can appreciate why many would be skeptical of this. Trump spent much of 2023, for example, dominating his intraparty rivals in state and national polling, leaving little doubt that he was likely to cruise to easy victories in GOP nominating contests. But as 2024 got underway, many undecided voters simply could not believe that Trump would lead the Republicans’ presidential ticket. What’s more, Team Biden’s internal polling also found that a majority of the campaign’s targeted voters didn’t believe that Trump would be the GOP nominee, despite the facts that seemed obvious to those following the race closely. As recently as mid-February, as Trump racked up primary and caucus victories, a national Monmouth University poll found that a third of voters believed it was “very” or “somewhat” likely that someone other than the former president would lead the Republican ticket. A debate in June would help bring the matter into sharp focus for voters with lingering doubts: Trump is all but certain to be on the 2024 ballot. Biden and his team believe this realization will help make a difference, which helps explain yesterday’s surprising news.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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