Speaking as an expert, I will say this: It is too early to confidently predict the results of the 2024 election. However, in line with what I have said in the past about the median voter and electability, what we do have a good idea about is the shape of public opinion, the positions of the candidates, and where those candidates are vulnerable. Today, I’m going to tell both parties how to lose the election.
This could be a close election either way; it could be a landslide defeat. The key to losing the election is alienating and offending as many voters as possible.
Double down on controversial victories
True popular progress on social issues comes slowly in either direction; both parties have adopted numerous hardline positions that are not popular with moderate voters. This creates a “pendulum swing” effect: Each side undermines their own popular support when they score major victories.
Republicans recently won a major victory on abortion with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which repealed Roe v. Wade (1973). Since the median voter supports moderate Roe-compliant restrictions on abortion, Republicans can alienate numerous swing voters by calling for a total national abortion ban.
While Democratic movement away from the winning position of “safe, legal, and rare” almost certainly undermined Democratic support in the 2012-2020 cycles, it’s less clear that Democrats have an easy path to alienating voters nationally on the abortion issue in a post-Dobbs environment.1
For Democrats, the equivalent of abortion issues are trans issues. Democrats have scored major victories in gaining legal and institutional support; however, transwomen competing in women’s sports polls at a net negative 41 points2 and a majority of the population thinks that changing gender is morally wrong.3
Support Russia, China, Iran, or Hamas
At present, polling shows net negative favorability rating for Donald Trump (-12.1%) and Joe Biden (-15.6%). On the balance, this implies that Trump is favored by a net share of about 1.8% of the population. On the same scale, the gap between favorable sentiments of Americans toward foreign countries in conflict is much more dramatic:4
Ukraine is favored over Russia by a net 61% of the population.
Taiwan is favored over China by a net 55% of the population.
Israel is favored over Palestine by a net 50% of the population.5
Both parties include fringe elements that are friendly to Russia, China, Iran, and Hamas, represented in Congress by what I like to refer to as the “Horseshoe Caucus.” The Horseshoe Caucus frequently bands together against bipartisan consensus positions, such as banning TikTok.6 On foreign policy, the Horseshoe Caucus presents different liabilities for different parties.
The Democratic side of the Horseshoe Caucus - spearheaded by Rashida Tlaib, who is actively campaigning against Biden - is ready to undermine support for Democrats at the ballot box with overt sympathy for Hamas. This risk is amplified by key unelected Democratic elites, including within the “blue bubble” media ecosystem and on college campuses, where overtly pro-Hamas protests can be easily linked to the left wing of the Democratic Party.
The Republican side of the Horseshoe Caucus has been openly sympathetic to Russia and in favor of cutting aid to Ukraine. Donald Trump was impeached in 2019 for withholding military aid to Ukraine. The “red bubble” media ecosystem includes overtly pro-Russian figures like Tucker Carlson.
While both parties can lose the election by bending to the will of their side of the horseshoe caucus, Democrats have additional liability: As president, Biden will be held largely responsible by voters for the course of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. No matter what Biden says, many voters will believe him responsible if the wars are going badly for Ukraine or Israel; thus, Democrats seeking to lose the election are well-advised to delay aid to Ukraine and Israel, holding it up with procedural measures or demanding restrictions on its use in the field.
Abandon the elected nominee
In theory, both parties have a chance to change out their designated candidates at the last minute at their party conventions.7 However, the voters have had their say, and any overt attempt to force out the elected nominees would be disastrous for the party that tried it.8
While Trump was clearly a poor choice of nominee, that choice has been made. Similarly, while “blue” media elites have revolted against Biden’s candidacy repeatedly, Democratic voters have stood behind Biden even more firmly than Republican voters stood behind Trump.
The nominees are locked and loaded. However, the elections of 2024 do not only include a presidential election. Both parties are contending for control of both houses of Congress, eleven state governorships, and 85 state legislative chambers in 44 different states. The last time a party threw its own primary results out of the window in favor of a candidate who did not win the primaries (Democrats in 1968), the party in question lost five senators and five governors in a downballot bloodbath.
Attempting to unseat the party’s nominee and actively campaigning against said nominee is generally an effective method of losing the election.
Embrace ideological purity, reject the median voter
Most of the advice I have given above boils down to this: Embrace extreme positions. Ignore what the voters say they want; instead, listen to elite opinion-mongers with large media platforms who reach one or another specific ideological audience.
The key to losing elections is to ignore swing voters, who lie within a fairly quiet and non-ideological segment of the electorate. Swing voters like to see stable institutions. They like political parties to respect the will of the voters participating in primary elections, even if they don’t much participate in those primaries themselves. And they fail almost every ideology’s purity tests.
If you are interested in losing, therefore, you should pay attention to the loudest voices on Twitter, the NYT op-ed page, Fox News, and NPR, and not so much to the boring nitty-gritty of public opinion polls; and to political scientists who shout about embracing radical positions to generate enthusiasm rather than those who tell say the median voter needs to be persuaded.
2012 is when the Democratic Party expunged its “safe, legal, and rare” plank; this also marks the pivot point on many other issues.
Pew poll here. This also shows a trend against basic acceptance that changing one’s sex is possible at all and more people who think that attitudes are changing too quickly than are changing too slowly.
Figures here are from Gallup’s 2023 polling. Note that the Palestinian Authority is the more sympathetic of the two Palestinian governments, with most indications being that American sympathies have shifted further toward Israel in 2024.
50% is using Gallup’s figure for the Palestinian Authority, which is fading from public view with the focus on Hamas in Gaza. This poll, focused on the war itself gives a narrower gap of 32% for validity of the conflict and 33% on the tactics used - in spite of the fact that most mainstream news coverage in the US comes from the “blue bubble” with a visible anti-Israel bias.
I don’t have the space in this article to spare for my full exploration of the Horseshoe Caucus. The underlying voting patterns are very interesting, though.
Note that ballot access laws and party rules make this move at best fraught with difficulty.
N.b.: I wrote this before the first presidential debate fueled a fresh round of demands for Biden to drop out from the NYT set. It’s still true as I hit the “publish” button today.