The State of the Union, and the shape of the Presidential race

I thought Biden’s State of the Union address last night was excellent. He was sharp. He was feisty. And he gave a clear signal of what his reelection message will be.

I’ve jotted down a few observations, both about the campaign’s comms strategy and about the general contours of the race.

TL;DR version: it’s going to be an extremely close election. An uncomfortably close election. That’s unavoidable, given the state of U.S. politics in 2024. But I’m optimistic that Biden is situated to take advantage of the string of inevitable missteps that Trump is sure to make. Hopefully that will be enough to matter.

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1. “My Predecessor.”

I thought it was interesting hearing how Biden drew a contrast with Trump. This is usually a communications challenge for a sitting President facing reelection. The President has a record to defend. That record includes campaign promises left unfulfilled. It includes events outside of his control, but the blame is still laid at his feet. The challenger is judged not on their record, but on their ambitions.

This works in the incumbent’s favor in good times, and in the challenger’s favor in bad times.

What I noticed last night was Biden taking full advantage of the fact that this particular opponent also has a record. The record is a faded memory for some. People may forget the sheer absurdity, corruption, and incompetence of the Trump Administration pre-COVID, because that was the before-times. And people may also forget just how badly Trump managed the pandemic response, because 2020 broke absolutely everyone, and we all process trauma in messed-up ways.

But it is a record, nonetheless. The section of the speech where Biden was contrasting his economic policies with Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthy. It’s strong stuff. If he were running against Nikki Haley or (eyeroll) Ron Desantis, he wouldn’t be able to draw nearly as clear a contrast. They would have proposals, but they’d also have the freedom to remain strategically vague about those proposals.

Likewise, the sections of the speech on Ukraine/NATO and abortion were very strong, because Trump has a record. I don’t know if there will be debates this fall. I kind of doubt it. But I do expect, once we reach the conventions and the regular campaign season, that the unprecedented ability to compare and contrast actual records will be an asset to the Biden team.

2. The expectations game.

Yes, the entire mainstream media is going to continue to spend the next several months harping on Biden’s age. I wrote a bit about this last month — we have a glut of campaign reporters with no competitive primaries to cover. The election is incredibly important, and Election Day is still so far from now. Bored reporters assigned to the Biden beat are going to cover the available controversy. And then they’re going to run polls that reflect back their coverage decisions. And then they’re going to report on the polls. It’s obnoxious, and frustrating, and irresponsible. It’s also entirely unsurprising.

But the upshot is that, on nights like last night, Biden easily beats the expectations that have been set. The guy has been in politics for fifty years. He’s funny. He’s sharp. He isn’t as masterful of a rhetorician as his two Democratic predecessors. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are once-in-a-generation talents. But he isn’t being compared to them. He’s being compared to his own caricature.

Trump, meanwhile, has the opposite problem. He has never been held to the standard of any other politician. Since 2016, we’ve been instructed to “take him seriously, not literally.” But he has also gotten worse since then. Donald Trump is not aging gracefully. Remember last month, when he confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi? That’s going to happen more and more while he’s on the campaign trail this fall. His base voters won’t care, because what they want is an authoritarian who will punish Democrats. But the voters who don’t particularly like either candidate are going to spend next fall being reminded that Biden-is-actually-better-than-they-thought, and oh-God-Trump-doesn’t-know-where-he-is-right-now.

3. Campaign quality

Overall, I kind of think Donald Trump is going to be the Biden campaign’s secret weapon. Donald Trump has never run a good campaign. 2016 was a mess. (Remember when, a month before the election, he picked a random fight with a former Miss Universe candidate about her nonexistent sex tape? Pro-tip: don’t do that.) 2020 was a catastrophe. (Remember when his campaign got owned so hard by TikTok teens that he fired his campaign manager?) And Trump himself has gotten worse. He is still relitigating 2020, insisting he was the real winner. He’s broke. He’s bitter. He’s a loser.

The backhanded blessing of the Trump Administration was that their malice was frequently undermined by their incompetence. I suspect, as the months draw closer to Election Day, that Trump’s own inability to keep his shit together will be Biden’s greatest asset.

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All that being said, I need to put my political scientist hat back on and offer some bum-everyone-out reminders:

• Campaign quality only matters at the margins. This is going to be a close election, no matter what. I sometimes hear members of the liberal pundit-class insisting that Biden must be blowing it because “he should be running away with this election.” That’s some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. We haven’t seen a blowout Presidential Election this century. The electorate has undergone partisan sorting. The media environment is fractured. And, with the Voting Rights Act effectively repealed by the Republican political operatives who make up a majority of the Supreme Court, structural voter suppression efforts have helped to maintain Republican minority rule in states where elections would otherwise become too competitive for their tastes.

• The Supreme Court majority will do everything in their power to help Trump. It turns out that, if you appoint a bunch of Republican political operatives to lifetime positions on the Supreme Court, they will go ahead and act like Republican political operatives. We know this. The Roberts Court constantly reminds us. If American electoral democracy is going to last beyond 2024, it is going to be sustained at the ballot box, despite whatever roadblocks Kavanaugh, Thomas, Alito, Coney Barrett, Gorsuch, Roberts, and a legion of Trump-appointed lower court justices are able to create. It’s going to be akin to winning a football game where the refs are all employed by the opposing team. Let’s not pretend this is an even playing field.

• Trump has a fundamentally simpler rhetorical strategy.

Here I’m just going to repost a passage from a piece I wrote in 2022. Biden’s central challenge is that he standing up for liberal technocracy. Trump is an authoritarian demagogue. And the siren song of authoritarian rhetoric can be very catchy. (particularly in bad times.)

I have suspected for some time that the core philosophical divide in American politics does not map neatly onto a battle between liberals and conservatives. We do not have two competing visions or policy platforms that voters are asked to select between. (The Republican Party does not even have a policy platform anymore – conservatism in America has been revealed as less a coherent ideology than a bundle of simmering resentments.)

What we have instead is two conflicting narratives about government and governance.

The first story goes something like this: “government and governance are fundamentally simple. The reason things have gone wrong is the crooks and idiots in charge. If we just get rid of the crooks and idiots and replace them with the right people, then everything will be fixed.”

You’ve heard this story before. It is the siren song of the authoritarian demagogue. You heard it, almost verbatim, from Donald Trump for years. It’s what he said on the campaign trail. It’s what he said in his convention speech. It’s what he said on Twitter and on television and in public and in private. The government is a mess because of all the crooks and idiots screwing things up. Trump promised that he alone could fix things. He lined up a parade of scapegoats to take the blame when conditions did not improve. He forever looked forward, finding some other crook or idiot to blame. Or he insisted the media coverage was all wrong, that things were in fact going great.

The second story is, in essence, a liberal technocratic narrative: “government and governance are fundamentally complicated. The reason things are going wrong is that governing a large, pluralist society is just really hard and includes a thousand hard-to-navigate tradeoffs. Well-meaning people, trying their best, can make government work better at the margins. But change is frustratingly slow and always incomplete. None of the hard problems can be easily fixed, or else they would have been fixed already.”

(As a political scientist, I am predisposed to believe this latter narrative. If there is one bedrock belief underlying my discipline, it is that government and governance are complicated. That is as close as the field comes to a shared ideology.)

It's tempting to label this a tension between populism and progressivism. But I’d caution that each of those terms has enough baggage and enough competing meanings that it can easily obscure more than it reveals. A full account of left-vs-right populism, and of the historical legacy of Teddy Roosevelt-era progressives is well beyond the bounds of this essay. Instead what I would like to focus attention on here is the rhetorical benefits and limitations of the two competing perspectives.

I am primarily a scholar of strategic political communication. That’s my disciplinary home, though it may be hard to tell from the essays I usually write here. (I’ve been on a bit of a post-tenure detour into other disciplinary conversations where I am very curious and way out-of-my-element.) What has always stood out to me about these two competing ideological perspectives is how slanted the playing field is between the two.

The ”it’s simple” camp has the benefit of much more compelling rhetoric. It contains all the elements of an effective story. There is a hero, a villain, a victim, and a plot resolution. (Elect me. I’ll toss the bums out. We’ll fix the economy/be tough on this problem/make crime go away. Things will all better once I’m in charge.)

What’s more, there are crooks and idiots in positions of power. It isn’t as though every government bureaucrat and politician is a genius/saint. So these stories can get specific, and timely, with news hooks that engage mainstream media and internet drama that can galvanize people on social media.

The “it’s complicated” camp — the defenders of liberal technocracy — have a much more difficult story to tell. “Elect me. We have hard problems, and I can’t make them go away overnight. But together, with time and hard work, we can fix things. It’s going to require patience and fortitude. But the best we can do for one other is to do our very best.”

That story sucks. It’s garbage-fire messaging. It demands daily feats of rhetorical brilliance to make it anything other than a bummer. And it’s a story that keeps being true long after it has lost its news hook and left online publics to wander off in search of more interesting controversies.

The difficulty here is of course that one of these camps is lying and the other is telling the truth. Government and governance is, in fact, complicated.

We are living through tough times. Biden did an impressive job last night of arguing for why his administration has made progress in improving things for everyday Americans. But it is a challenging case to make, because nothing is simple, and he cannot credibly promise to bring the tough times to an end. Trump can make that promise. It’s a lie, but a lie that is the very center of his worldview.

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Ultimately, I am confident the Biden campaign will be more competently run than the Trump campaign.

But the election will still be a nail-biter.

I’m not sure if it will be enough.

But I am, for once, slightly optimistic.