Take Two

Remarkably, Trump’s advantage is despite 91 felony counts against him from four separate cases, including two accusing him of trying to subvert Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Meanwhile, the economic indicators that historically predict an incumbent American president’s re-election chances largely favor Biden: The U.S. unemployment rate has been at record lows for much of his first term; U.S. GDP growth is the highest among all advanced economies; and U.S. workers’ wages are now rising, even when adjusted for inflation. Inflation itself, which hit levels unseen in 40 years during the pandemic, has been falling for months. So why are all these polls showing Trump ahead of Biden?

David A. Hopkins is an associate professor of political science at Boston College. To Hopkins, a few key factors account for Trump’s apparent edge.

Biden simply isn’t appealing to a lot of young Americans, for one, while many voters are still upset about price increases in recent years—and still blaming the president for them. But there are broader trends behind the numbers, too. The country’s political parties are increasingly divided by educational class; those with a college degree are more and more likely to vote for Democrats, while those without one are more and more likely to vote Republican. And that trend is growing among Blacks and Latinos, bringing greater support for the Republican Party with it. More broadly, Americans are unhappy about the state of their country, feeling it’s heading in the wrong direction. That sentiment is driving rising support for the populist right in the U.S., Hopkins says, as it is worldwide.

This early, none of these dynamics, or the polls reflecting them, mean Trump will come away with the American presidency in 2024; but as Hopkins sees it, they almost certainly mean another very close election—whose outcome will swing according to dramatic global forces.

Even the other Republicans running against Trump in their party’s primary race—apart from Chris Christie, who’s explicitly anti-Trump—aren’t building their case against him on his legal status. Their political sense is that it wouldn’t help them. And their avoidance only reinforces Republican voters’ perception: There’s no real reason to be troubled by any of Trump’s legal issues.

Bluhm: Polling shows a small but important percentage of Black and Latino voters having shifted from supporting Joe Biden in 2020 to supporting Trump now. What would you say we know about the causes of this shift?

Hopkins: Not much we can be sure about. The data is very limited. When you break down these national polls into different racial groups, you end up with small sample sizes that are considerably less reliable as bases for general conclusions.

That said, at least two causes are probably at play here. One is that Biden has a weakness among younger non-white voters, who don’t find him appealing personally or as a candidate.

A second cause, however, is a larger partisan shift that was going on before 2020 and may be continuing into 2024: The so-called diploma divide between whites with and without college degrees—which has defined a lot of the shifts among white voters over the last 10 years—is showing signs of extending to non-white voters, as well.

The divide among Blacks and Latinos isn’t as big as among white voters, but it seems to be growing. If that’s true—and the data is starting to convince me that it is true—it’s probably happening for similar reasons as among whites. Americans without college degrees tend to see the Democratic Party as more intellectual, more socially progressive, more feminized—a “woke” party, as detractors call it; and it’s losing appeal among these Americans across racial groups. The Republican Party, in its populist, Trump-era form appeals even to Latinos—though many Democrats appear surprised by this, after Trump’s many derogatory statements about Mexicans and immigrants generally.

Meanwhile, the gender gap seems to be growing among non-white voters, with women more likely to support Democrats and men to support Republicans. This gap has historically been smaller among non-white voters, but it seems to be getting bigger now, especially among Latinos—more so among younger Latinos. Latino women are still predominantly Democratic voters, but younger Latino men aren’t as solidly Democratic as they tended to be in the past.

“We’ve had reliable polling data in the United States since the late 1940s. Since then, there’ve been plenty of cases where a candidate was behind at this point and ended up winning. Some argue that in the 21st century, things are different because the electorate is more partisan and less volatile from election to election. It’s certainly fair to say, the predictive power of recent polls is greater than zero. But polling results will almost certainly change between now and election day.”

“Right-wing populism is a worldwide phenomenon—the right-wing populist Javier Milei, for example, was just elected president of Argentina. Similarly, the rise of a technocracy dominated by well-educated, socially liberal progressives is also a global phenomenon. And these two phenomena are two sides of the same coin. It’s possible to see populism as a response to globalization, immigration, and the rise of an elite class of technocratic experts. Americans often like to tell stories about American politics and history that are only about American politics or history. But I’ve never been more convinced that U.S. politics now significantly reflects massive, historic, global trends as well.”

“I see global society, Western society especially, in an era of historically dramatic transformational change that’s taking place in a remarkably short period of time. The whole world is so different than it was 50 or 60 years ago. Some have benefited from these changes, but others feel left behind—and not just economically; they also feel a decline in the social status of the groups they identify with and in the social norms they’re used to, including sexual and gender norms. And it’s deeply disorienting. Around the world, the differences between the left and the right are becoming more and more the differences between those who feel these changes are benefiting them, or who at least feel they can adapt, and those who feel everything’s been going in the wrong direction—and the world they grew up in is disappearing.”