Everyone Hates This Election
Unlike in 2020, however, the unprecedented aspects of the 2024 election help explain what most voters hate about it. Biden and Trump are both known entities, and thus neither can honestly claim to be the candidate of change. Yes, Trump is promising to upend the federal government and remake it in his image, but his brand of chaos is familiar to voters. In 2016, he ran as a genuine outsider and as a bull in the Washington china shop—then failed to deliver on his promise to destroy the old political order. Aside from a commitment to tariffs and to lengthy, middle-of-the-night tweetstorms, he largely governed as a bog standard Republican. His signature achievement in office was, after all, a large corporate tax cut.
Biden won in 2020 in large part by promising to end the chaos that defined Trump’s presidency and steer America out of the pandemic. He assured America that he would be predictable, even boring, and he has delivered. His signature legislative accomplishment is a massive (bipartisan) infrastructure bill—classic roads-and-bridges spending. He has largely governed by consulting his cabinet and leading Democrats in Congress. The unemployment rate is historically low, the stock market historically high.
But Biden has been bedeviled by chaos he didn’t create, and voters are punishing him for it: two foreign wars, in Ukraine and Gaza, and steep inflation from pandemic-era supply shocks. Biden has handled Ukraine well, and defied expectations in taming inflation. But his decision to continue to back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government as Israel relentlessly bombed Palestinians has divided the Democratic coalition and rightly angered young voters who are, in some polls, backing Biden and Trump in roughly equal numbers.