I Am Still Optimistic About 2024. Sorry.

A few thoughts about January 6th, the 2024 election, and doomscrolling

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

It would have been reasonable for subscribers to Drezner’s World to expect a post on January 6th with Very Deep Thoughts about the meaning of that date for the United States. It’s not like there was a shortage of them (see John Ganz’s take for example)! You were all spared that, however, because the hard-working staff of Drezner’s World was on an extended family vacation in Tryon, North Carolina. We were there to commemorate my mother in law’s passing a year ago.

Tryon is an interesting town — it’s Nina Simone’s birthplace, for one thing. It’s so picturesque that a Christmas movie used it as a setting. It has some of the best barbecue I have eaten in my life, and is close to one of the best Cuban restaurants north of Miami.

Tryon is in Polk County, which in 2020 voted for Trump 62.3% to 36.6%. But it is also close to Asheville, which went for Biden 59.9% to 38.7% that same year. It’s the kind of town where one downtown store can proclaim itself open to all gender identities and yet, just around the corner, there is a pizza place containing one wall plastered with printouts of #MAGA tweets explaining, among other things, how Biden could not possibly have won the 2020 election.

There are parts of the country that are even more in the bag for Trump than Tryon. Nonetheless it was a good place to read story after story after story after story about how Republican elites have shifted over the past three years from rejecting Trump on the day of the January 6th insurrection to, as the former president himself put it, bending the knee.

This, combined with the current state of general election polling, have caused many to despair that Trump has successfully put January 6th behind him. If the former president and reality-show host were to win a second term in 2024, the lesson the country and the world would take is that the country has shifted from being a liberal democracy to being a illiberal democracy that is comfortable with extralegal attempts to seize power. It would be like turning the clock back more than a century. Seen in this light, January 6th could be viewed in the future in the same way that the 1923 beer hall putsch is viewed today: an initial farce followed by tragedy.

This is the context through which many will read Axios’ Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen recent take on how leading Democrats believe the Biden White House is not treating the 2024 campaign with the same sense of urgency. According to their report, which builds on earlier reporting in New York magazine and the Washington Post, “Lots of high-level Democrats are warning that President Biden and his reelection team are too complacent — and unimaginative — about the threat of losing to Donald Trump.”

Why? Allen and VandeHei write:

When pressed on why they think things are fine, Biden allies invoke four articles of faith:

1. The war [in Gaza], they think, will be far in voters' rearview mirror by Nov. 5.

2. By then, the economy will be so good voters can't ignore it. Voter confidence, the hope is, will catch up with the encouraging macro signs.

3. Abortion rights: Dems will be boosted by the anti-GOP backlash following the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade — swing voters won't want to give Trump a chance to appoint another Supreme Court justice. As Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff has put it privately: "Dobbs and democracy."

4. Biden and allies will spend more than $1 billion telling voters Trump is terrible. In the end, Biden's inner circle contends, most independents won't look themselves in the mirror on Election Day, then go vote for Trump.

That last assumption is key, of course, and the source of so much Democratic angst. And I can certainly poke some holes in the Biden team’s assumptions.¹

When it comes to Trump, however, I still think that the Biden team is largely correct. Hence my optimism for 2024.

Why do I think they’re right?