The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set newsroom policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
Amy Fried is a political science professor at the University of Maine. Her views are her own and do not represent those of any group with which she is affiliated.
Predicting elections more than a year out is a fool’s errand, as too many unforeseen events can intervene.
Nonetheless, the chances that President Joe Biden will win a second term are certainly getting better. Biden’s re-election hopes depend on a lot of hard work from him and his supporters and on four other factors.
First, the country is doing better than when Biden took office and in the last year. Generally, what people care about is trending well.
Take the economy. Rather than heading into a recession, growth is strengthening and is higher than economic analysts expected.
The jobs picture is terrific, with continued very low unemployment rates. Half the states, Bloomberg reports, have the lowest or near record low unemployment. As Biden recently pointed out (and Politifact found to be “accurate”), the unemployment rate has “been below 4% for the longest stretch in 50 years in American history.”
Inflation is falling and consumer confidence is up among all income groups. People are earning more, as wages are rising more than inflation.
As Axios points out, two other Republican campaign issues — crime and immigration — are also moving in the right direction, with less violent crime and fewer border crossings.
Second, Biden can point to how he made things better.
He’s been focused on boosting good-paying jobs in the United States. Three 2022 laws — the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — are the key means for meeting these goals. All but the first were passed with strong bipartisan majorities.
As the Financial Times reported in April, those laws are already bearing fruit. As Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing stated, “The industrial policy that’s being put into place hasn’t been seen for generations. This is a generational, transformational change that we’re seeing in America and our productive capacity.” Massive investments are being made in manufacturing.
Biden keeps giving manufacturing attention, including with the executive order he signed last week in Auburn on making American inventions in the United States.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which no Republican backed, also makes our tax system fairer, focuses on clean technologies and the climate crisis. It reduces health care costs with lower ACA premiums and lower drug costs for people getting Medicare.
Third, many of the Republican Party’s policies and its approach are generally quite unpopular.
For decades, Republicans ran on trying to overturn Roe v Wade. When this happened, their triumph on abortion policy harmed them politically — and will continue to do so.
One can see the folly of opposing Biden’s popular policies in what happened when Republican Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene spoke about Biden’s continuation of Franklin Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s pursuit of “programs to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid labor unions, and he still is working on it.” Biden made an ad with Greene’s words and tweeted it out with the words “I approve this message.”
Meanwhile, the House GOP is resolutely focused on trying to find a scandal to harm Biden. But the legal problems of a president’s son are not a presidential scandal. Still, MAGA Republicans want to impeach Biden (and to expunge Donald Trump’s impeachments, something that’s not part of our constitutional system), even though Speaker Kevin McCarthy warned them behind closed doors that evidence is lacking.
Fourth, Donald Trump is the likely Republican nominee. Perhaps because many Republicans have been convinced by Trump that he really won in 2020, they think Trump would beat Biden in 2024. While Trump motivates people to go to the polls for him, he also motivates voters to show up to cast their ballots against him. Trump’s mounting legal troubles will make his situation more politically difficult.
No doubt, there are many unknowns before Nov. 5, 2024. But right now, Biden’s re-election hopes are getting rosier. If this continues, Biden can run a campaign focused on a better economy, ending the pandemic, rebuilding our alliances and protecting our democracy — and can win a second term.
