General elections in the United States will take place November 5, 2024. At the start of 2024, there are Democrats and Republicans presidential nomination contest who will elect delegates to party nominating conventions. These conventions, in July (for Republicans) and August (for Democrats), officially select their parties’ presidential candidates.
The first contest will be the Iowa Republican caucus on January 15, followed by the New Hampshire primary for both parties on January 23. There will be several more contests in February before many states vote on “Super Tuesday” on March 5. a small percentage of the total delegates, with less than 10% of delegates determined by the Michigan primary on February 27.
A “caucus” is run by the state party and often requires voters to meet at a specific time. A “primary” is administered by the state election authority and is conducted in the same manner as a general election. Turnout in primaries is much higher than in caucuses. In 2024, the vast majority of competitions will use primaries.
Democratic delegates are distributed proportionally with a threshold of 15%. The allocation of Republican delegates depends on the state: some states award delegates proportionally, but many others award delegates to winner-take-all or winner-take-all.
In FiveThirtyEight According to polls, former President Donald Trump is well ahead in national Republican primary polls with 61.7%, followed by Ron DeSantis with 12.2% and Nikki Haley with 11.3%. Trump is also dominant in Iowa with 46.7%, followed by DeSantis at 19.6% and Haley at 15.0%.
If the election results reflect these national polls, Trump will win a huge majority of delegates.
On the Democratic side, no prominent Democrats have challenged President Joe Biden. Biden has 65.8% nationally with Marianne Williamson at 7.6% and Dean Phillips at 5.4%.
Trump leads general election polls
In the general presidential election, there are 538 electoral votes and you need 270 to win. Electoral votes are awarded to states as the sum of their House seats (based on population) and their senators (always two), so the least populated states have three electric vehicles. With two minor exceptions, states award their electric vehicles to the winner.
Trump won the 2016 election despite losing the national popular vote by 2.1%. In 2020, Biden won the popular vote by 4.5%, but only won the state that gave it more than 270 electric vehicles by 0.6%. It is likely that Trump will once again benefit from the electoral vote imbalance.
Learn more:
2016 US Election Final Results: How Trump Won
that of Biden FiveThirtyEight National ratings are 55.6% disapprove, 38.3% approve (net -17.3). His ratings have been declining since March, when he was a net -7.3. Trump’s notes are 52.3% unfavorable, 42.3% favorable (net -9.9). His grades have improved since August when he was -18.1.
Biden trails Trump by single digits between 1 and 10 percent in most cases. national polls, and this does not take into account the probable bias of the electoral vote. Trump’s margin over Biden increases slightly when third-party candidates are included.
By the general election, Biden will be almost 82 and Trump will be 78. Beginning of November Surveys in Siena The New York Times gave Trump a four- to 10-point lead in five of the six closest states Biden won in 2020.
While Trump led by five points in the polls in Siena, a Unnamed Generic Democrat led Trump by eight. In a similar exercise a year before the 2020 election, Biden led Trump by two and a generic Democrat led by three. This implies that replacing Biden with a much younger Democrat would boost their hopes of beating Trump.
Economic pessimism helps Trump
At a national meeting in early December Wall Street Journal Poll, two-thirds rated the economy as bad or not good, and two-thirds said it had gotten worse over the past two years during Biden’s term. Trump led Biden 52-35 on how best to manage the economy. By a vote of 53 to 23, voters thought Biden’s policies had harmed rather than helped them personally, while they thought Trump’s policies had helped them by a vote of 49 to 37.
WE headline and underlying inflation was about 2% per year pre-COVID, but overall inflation peaked at 8.9% in June 2022. Even though inflation fell to 3.1% in November, voters still remember that goods and services used to be much cheaper.
Real wages (adjusted for inflation) increased by 0.2% in hourly terms or 0.5% in weekly terms in Novemberand are up 0.8% and 0.5% respectively for the 12 months ending in November.
THE personal savings rate was 3.8% in October. Pre-COVID, savings exceeded 5% and reached record levels during the pandemic due to stimulus payments and lack of spending opportunities. But the effects of inflation have eroded these gains.
U.S. employment numbers remained strong, with 199,000 jobs added in November and an unemployment rate of 3.7%. The population employment rate – the percentage of eligible Americans employed – was 60.5% in November. He almost came back to where it was before the COVID pandemic has started (61.1%).
Can Biden recover from this?
There are almost 11 months until the general election. Economic pessimism could be lifted if there were more months in which real wages rose significantly, which should help Biden if that happens.
Trump faces four separate trials following allegations of election interference after the 2020 federal and Georgia elections, wrongful withholding of classified documents after leaving office, and hush money payments to a porn star.
Even if convicted, Trump can still running for president. But a conviction could hurt Trump’s standing in the polls. If Trump won, he could apologize for the federal charges, but not for the Georgia election interference charges or the hush money charges (this is a New York state case).
The biggest hopes for a Biden recovery are therefore an improvement in the economic climate before the elections and a condemnation of Trump. But Biden’s age isn’t going to get any better.
Democrats’ chances of holding the presidency could improve if Biden steps down and allows Democrats to choose a replacement. For this to happen, Biden would need to step down before the Democratic convention on August 19-22, 2024.
