The state of the 2024 election on the day before Iowa

296 — that’s how many days there are until the 2024 election. But even though that’s a long way off, I can already tell you a few things that will happen.

The race for control of the House of Representatives will be close; Decision Desk HQ’s generic ballot polling average shows a R+1.5 point lead at the time of writing. In the Senate, Republicans only need to flip two seats to take the majority (or one seat, if they win the White House), and Democrats are playing defense in 23 out of 34 seats — including Montana, Ohio and West Virginia, three states that Trump won comfortably twice — so it’s likely that Mitch McConnell will be back as majority leader in 2025.

At the presidential level, it’s almost certainly going to be a 2020 rematch. Despite recent momentum for Nikki Haley, Donald Trump continues to dominate the Republican primary: he leads in national primary polling by 50.9 points; in Iowa by 36.1 points; in New Hampshire by 11 points (though Haley has surged there in the past few weeks); and in South Carolina by 28.3 points. Barring a major health complication or legal issue, Trump is overwhelmingly likely to be the GOP nominee.

On the Democratic side, Joe Biden is on a glide path to renomination. Despite weak approval and favorability ratings and concerns over his age, the president faces no serious challengers in the Democratic primary: his only competitors — Dean Phillips, a moderate congressman from the Minneapolis suburbs, and Marianne Williamson, a self-help author — poll well behind him. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the primary to run as an independent candidate; Cornel West, a public intellectual and activist, is also running as an independent; Jill Stein is running as a Green Party candidate again.

Who will be the next president of the United States? The boring answer is that it’s too early to say — and if I knew, I’d be placing bets instead of telling you. Here are some plausible arguments for both Biden and Trump.

The case for a Trump victory

The story of a Trump victory is simple: Biden is an unpopular president. His net job approval rating is -13.3 and his net favorability rating is -9.9, per our averages. He’s widely seen as too old to serve another term. Voters, especially young ones, disapprove of his handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Consumers are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the state of the economy. Softening support among nonwhite voters and third-party candidates acting as spoilers could cost the president reelection.

According to Decision Desk HQ’s analysis, Trump will enjoy a substantial, if diminished, advantage in the Electoral College: the “tipping-point state” is projected to be 2.4 points more Republican than the nation overall, down from 3.9 points in 2020; this implies that if the popular vote is tied, Trump would have a roughly 82 percent chance of winning.

Polls currently have Trump ahead. In our national averages, Trump leads Biden by 1.1 points; in the states, he’s ahead in Arizona (R+6.8), Florida (R+9.1), Georgia (R+6), Michigan (R+3.1), Nevada (R+3.2), North Carolina (R+8), Ohio (R+10.4) and Wisconsin (R+0.7). Biden leads in only New Hampshire (D+5) and Virginia (D+4.9). If these margins hold, then Trump will win.

The case for a Biden victory

A reelection campaign is typically seen as a referendum on the incumbent. If that is the case next year, then, as the kids say, it’s Joever. But to the extent that 2024 is seen as a choice between Biden and Trump, Biden has a fighting chance. True, Biden is unpopular, but so is Trump: his net favorability rating is -7.1.

The path to a Biden victory is to remind voters why they picked him over Trump last time. Yes, Biden’s numbers are bad right now. But his campaign is banking on the idea that ordinary voters (i.e. not the kind of people reading this article) haven’t tuned into the race yet — and that once they do, they’ll see Biden as the lesser of two evils. Specifically, his campaign points toward stronger-than-expected Democratic performances in special elections and the midterms and the unpopularity of abortion bans as evidence that Biden is on track to win

In 2022, Democratic candidates ran on average behind Biden and did especially poorly in states such as Florida and New York. But in battleground districts, candidates outperformed the party’s 2020 benchmark. Perhaps this was because voters in those tipping-point races were turned off by perceived Republican extremism — for example, Decision Desk HQ/NewsNation polling from December found that 53 percent of voters said that the GOP was doing too much to restrict abortion, including 30 percent of Republicans — and voted blue despite reservations about the president.

Pro-choice ballot referendums have won every time since the Dobbs decision, even solidly Republican states such as Ohio, Montana and Kansas. Split Ticket’s analysis of the midterm results found that Republican candidates in battleground races who denied the results of the 2020 election ran 2.1 points worse than one would expect, even after controlling for partisanship, fundraising and incumbency.

These results fit neatly with the political science literature on “thermostatic” public opinion, which argues that voters are generally risk-averse and dislike large changes in public policy. Suppose Biden can successfully cast himself as the defender of the status quo and Trump as the man responsible for Jan. 6 and the end of Roe v. Wade. In that case, he might be able to overcome his weak numbers and win another term.

Milan Singh is a data science fellow at Decision Desk HQ and a sophomore at Yale College. Follow him @milansingh03.