Democrats seek change in the 2024 race, while Republicans prefer stability

With the 2024 presidential race deadlocked or slightly favoring former President Donald Trump less than five months away from Election Day, Republican pollster Jim McLaughlin offered President Joe Biden some advice: Keep running.

McLaughlin, who has done polling for Trump, made his “Stay in the race” quip in response to a question from NBC News’s Katherine Doyle at a panel discussion in Washington, D.C., on Thursday afternoon. At the same event, pollsters James Johnson and Landon Wall presented findings that Trump’s New York hush money conviction was practically a wash with voters, with the presumptive Republican nominee gaining as well as losing support.

Republican voters are more pro-Trump than anti-Biden, according to various polls, while the opposite is true for the Democrats. But many Republicans still feel fortunate in their opponent. Biden, like Hillary Clinton eight years ago, might be the GOP MVP.

The race for the White House is close. Trump leads Biden in the national RealClearPolitics polling average by just 0.8 points. According to the same aggregate, Trump is up in all the battleground states but by margins that range from 0.1 points to 5.3 points.

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Yet nothing that has happened in the past few months has jolted the presidential contest out of its near stalemate — not Trump’s felony conviction or Hunter Biden’s (though it is still early) or any fluctuation in the economic data as the Federal Reserve attempts to stick a “soft landing” by whipping inflation without triggering a recession.

Democrats outperformed their poll numbers in the 2022 midterm elections and some recent special elections. Trump outperformed his in 2016 and 2020.

The relative unpopularity of the two major party candidates has kept things close by historical standards. But the resulting slog is why the two most commonly proposed scenarios for shaking up the race involve Trump’s incarceration or Biden’s replacement at the Democratic National Convention.

Neutral observers wonder how much a traditional campaign can swing an election between two highly familiar candidates who have both served in the White House. Partisans, especially though not exclusively on the Democratic side, fear they are poised to nominate the only candidate who can lose to the other party’s highly flawed choice.

This fear intensifies among Democrats whenever Biden has a significant age-related stumble or faces a batch of especially discouraging polls. The president’s party is split between those who hope Trump’s narrow lead will prove as ephemeral as the “red wave” of 2022 and those who don’t think a race against a felony-convicted, multi-indicted, twice-impeached ex-president who lost in 2020 should even be a jump ball, especially with Democratic Senate candidates still leading in places like Ohio, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada.

Many Democrats hope for, while Republicans worry about, an “August surprise,” even though replacing both an incumbent president who swept the primaries and Vice President Kamala Harris against their will while the ticket remains in striking distance of an Electoral College majority would be nearly impossible.

Electability concerns about Trump were similarly expressed by supporters of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley during the Republican primaries, though the former president’s polling endurance has mostly muted them for now.

In past elections, it wasn’t clear who was ahead until after both parties’ conventions. This time, the first presidential debate will take place before either candidate is nominated. Trump will be sentenced days before Republicans gather in Milwaukee to nominate him for the third straight time.

Nevertheless, it is Biden who is the subject of most of the contested convention talk, however improbable, not the former president facing the possibility of 136 years in prison, however remote, while clinging to a 1-point national lead.

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Maybe the race will change after the first debate. Or next month. Or the month after that. This could, after all, be the longest general election campaign in history. It is already a rematch of 2020.

Under former President Barack Obama, Democrats billed themselves as the party of hope and change. Those words still apply to their aspirations for the 2024 presidential campaign. Republicans want it to stay the same.