There isn’t an American alive who’s seen a presidential election like the one taking shape this year. Every four years, the electorate confronts one of two kinds of elections: Either there’s an incumbent president facing a challenger, or it’s an open race in which there is no incumbent.
With the former, voters ask whether to stick with the president they have or take a chance on his or her rival. With the latter, voters have to decide between contenders, neither of whom has served as the nation’s chief executive.
But in 2024, barring dramatic and unexpected developments, Americans will choose between a sitting president and a former president. One will point to overwhelming evidence and say the nation is healthier, safer, and more prosperous since he took office. The other will point to an alternate reality in which the country was better off in the recent past.
The resulting dynamic couldn’t be more straightforward. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan urged voters to ask themselves, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” A generation later, both the presumptive Democratic nominee and the presumptive Republican nominee are pushing the identical question — though they have very different answers.
The Associated Press reported this week on President Joe Biden’s efforts to take the offensive on the issue.
“Speaking of Donald Trump, just a few days ago, he asked the famous question at one of his rallies: Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Biden said at a pair of Dallas-area campaign fundraisers, one of which brought in $2.5 million, one of the hosts said. “Well, Donald, I’m glad you asked that question man because I hope everyone in the country takes a moment to think back when it was like in March of 2020,” Biden said.
A day later, seizing on an item the former president published to his social media platform this week, the Biden campaign unveiled a digital ad on the “better off four years ago” question, reminding the public what things were like four years ago.
For all intents and purposes, this is the 2024 presidential campaign in a nutshell. If you think conditions in the United States have improved since January 20, 2021, then you won’t feel the need to go backwards. If you think conditions were better four years ago, then you’ll reject the status quo and pick the guy who preceded the incumbent.
For Biden and his party, the urge to be forward-thinking is no doubt strong, but given the circumstances, Democrats have little choice but to spend the next several months refreshing Americans’ memories — because much of the country has forgotten how catastrophically bad things were when Trump was in office.
As a recent New York Times piece summarized, “Not all that long ago, many Americans committed hours a day to tracking then-President Donald J. Trump’s every move. And then, sometime after the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and before his first indictment, they largely stopped. They are having trouble remembering it all again.”
The headline read, “Do Americans Have a ‘Collective Amnesia’ About Donald Trump?” The answer, to a very real extent, is yes. Some voters don’t even remember Jan. 6 as well as they should.
American voters aren’t accustomed to considering candidates for national office who’ve already won, failed, lost, and asked for a second bite at the apple. With this in mind, campaigns are supposed to be about the future, but to understand what’s to come, Biden and his allies have little choice but to remind the electorate about the recent past that much of the country has forgotten.
Reality leaves little doubt that the country is better off than it was four years ago by practically every relevant metric. The Democratic president has 227 days to refresh voters’ memories and bring this truth into focus.