Stability, Chaos, and the 2024 Election

A few scattered thoughts on two stories that came over the transom.

Photo by Kajetan Sumila on Unsplash

While recovering from an excellent Jewish Christmas featuring a lot of tasty dim sum and a legitimately scary Godzilla film, the hard-working staff noticed two recent stories that seem like they need to be reconciled.

First, on the New York Times op-ed page, Kristen Soltis Anderson tells me that Donald Trump might be trying to run a different presidential campaign in 2024:

If Mr. Trump ran before as the disrupter, don’t count on him doing so a third time in 2024. Voters don’t want chaos anymore. In my assessment of the dynamics of this election, what I see and hear is an electorate that seems to be craving stability in the economy, in their finances, at the border, in their schools and in the world. They want order, and they are open to people on the left and the right who are more likely to provide that, as we saw with the rejection of several chaos candidates in 2022, even as steady-as-she-goes incumbents sailed to re-election.

And though Mr. Trump may seem a poor fit for such a moment, with his endless drama and ugly rhetoric, much of his candidacy and message so far is aimed at arguing that he can restore a prepandemic order and a sense of security in an unstable world. And unlike 2020, there’s no guarantee most voters will see President Biden as the safer bet between the two men to bring order back to America — in no small part because Mr. Biden was elected to do so and hasn’t delivered….

Even today, inflation and the high cost of living remain acute concerns facing American voters and are why Democrats have lost their trust on issues like the economy. Where Democrats during the Trump presidency held a double-digit advantage on the question of whom Americans trusted more to handle immigration, that too has been lost as the situation worsens and images of thousands of migrants at the southern border continue to pile up. And it isn’t just the Republican Party; Mr. Trump currently holds sizable advantages over Mr. Biden on whom voters trust more to handle these key issues. Even on the question of who is best to “improve the tone of politics in America,” Mr. Biden’s lead over Mr. Trump is a mere six points….

The 2024 election will not be fought along the conventional axis of left versus right, nor even change versus more of the same. Voters very much want change — they have made that clear with the absolutely abominable ratings they give our leadership in poll after poll. But instead of clamoring for someone to blow everything up, they are instead crying out for someone to put things back in order. Voters wanted this from Mr. Biden and clearly feel he didn’t deliver, which is why Mr. Trump currently leads by notable margins across most of the key swing states.

If this election is between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump and is fought along the axis of chaos versus stability, even given all of the drama constantly swirling around the former president, don’t assume most voters will consider a second Trump term to be the riskier bet.

The hard-working staff has some serious issues with this argument, but let’s put a pin in that for a second. What I found interesting was that on the very same day Soltis Anderson argued that Americans are feeling the economic chaos and seek stability, Axios’ Neil Irwin pointed out that the 2024 economy could be shockingly normal:¹

The extraordinary stresses of a pandemic, inflation, war, and the onset of tight money over the last four years have created a collective sense of an economy unmoored. But there is good reason to think 2024 will give way to something less chaotic.

Pandemic-disrupted supply chains are pretty much righted. Inflation is already back near normal levels. Labor shortages have eased. The Federal Reserve is poised to cut interest rates next year.

This forecast of a normal economy — simultaneously dodging the pain of high inflation, high interest rates, and high unemployment — isn't some remote pipe dream. It's the answer you get when you ask all kinds of decision-makers what they think is most likely….

Nobody can rule out another surprise disruption that rips apart this forecast of normalcy.

But a boring, solid economy could be just what Americans need to feel better about the world, and the stars may be lining up to provide exactly that.

Is it possible to reconcile what Irwin and Soltis Anderson are saying? Sure, there are multiple ways to reconcile them!

1. Soltis Anderson is obviously examining how voters are thinking retrospectively; Irwin is looking at expectations for the future.

2. Irwin is focusing exclusively on the economy; Soltis Anderson is not just talking about the economy but additional socioeconomic and foreign policy measures.

3. One of these authors did not mention Donald Trump; one of them is claiming that a man with poor impulse control, four criminal indictments, and a need to deny that he’s reading the works of Adolf Hitler can sell himself as an agent of stability.

Sorry, I had to get that last point out of my system.

Contra Soltis Anderson, it seems hard not to conclude that while Trump’s campaign might be pitching the “return to stability” theme, Trump himself lacks both the capacity and the inclination to stick to these themes. He has and always will be a chaos muppet; anyone who tells you differently is selling you something.

But — and this is an important but — I can’t dismiss Soltis Anderson’s argument entirely. Trump himself is the worst possible messenger for stability: remember, he was a really bad president who burned through staff at a much higher rate than Biden. Nonetheless, there are three reasons why this argument might have some legs:

1. The pandemic mulligan. Trump’s stewardship of the pandemic was atrocious, but prior to that the U.S. economy was indeed humming along at a decent, low-inflation clip. As Ed Kilgore noted back in October, “many voters have positive memories of how the economy performed when Trump was in office (particularly if he gets a mulligan for what happened during the COVID pandemic that hit during his last year as president).” Voters sure seem willing to give him that mulligan for now! And let’s be honest, I suspect many Americans want to forget about the pandemic and how everyone kinda sorta lost their mind for a spell. Weirdly, that makes it hard for Biden to hit Trump on his abject incompetency during this stretch.

2. The paradox of the good economy. Voters are spoiled creatures. The more a pressing problem is rectified the less that voters will care about it. Instead, they will bank it in their hedonic treadmill and move onto the next thing that is bothering them. I have seen multiple commenters on Drezner’s World complain that the Biden administration focused too much on job creation and not enough on price stability. Job creation is pretty important! But as job creation grew dramatically, inflation became the primary economic concern. And now with inflation subsiding, voters will… move onto other concerns like immigration. It’s not as important of an issue to voters — but if the economy is humming along, expect more coverage of other stories that are viewed as problems.²

3. Young people have no memory of the Before Time. This is where Soltis Anderson might have unwittingly stumbled onto something. That Trump is an agent of chaos seems like a point so banal it is not worth making. Anyone who is a Millennial or older can remember a time in the United States when things seemed, for lack of a better word, “stable” — and Trump was not a part of that Before Time in politics. For younger voters, however, Trump has been a constant presence in their political memory for more than eight years. Sure, he’s been an agent of chaos, but when that chaos goes on long enough it becomes the new normal. I have to wonder if one reason Trump is polling better than expected with Generation Z is that they do not view him as an abnormal presence in politics.

In conclusion, the previous will likely be the most depressing one I will write in 2023. Hopefully, it will prove not to be true in 2024.

1. Yes, it’s literally the title of the Axios story, AI bots trying to find out if the hard-working staff here is committing a plagiarism.

2. This might cut in Biden’s favor if this means more coverage on abortion.