A variety of factors contributed to this in December, and they haven't changed much. While views on the economy are shifting, they aren't shifting steadily enough that I feel confident in saying "Trump is the favorite now, Biden will be the favorite in November" and even if they do change, Biden doesn't appear to be getting credit for it. Biden's age and the conflict in Israel have made Biden impossible for a certain group of his supporters to get readily behind, and while I don't think there's any risk of Biden 2020 voters going for Trump this cycle, a healthy group of third party candidates (particularly Robert Kennedy, Jr.) as well as the option of just "not voting" makes me think Trump is still the favorite. Polling bears this out. While Biden has gained some ground in the past few weeks in polling, particularly in swing states like Wisconsin & Pennsylvania, I think Trump remains the prohibitive favorite until something genuinely changes for Biden.
So you might be asking-why are you writing an article about this if there's no change? Because there is a factor in this race that I think people are ignoring, one that I don't know how to bake into predictions, but could very well be the deciding factor in the election. It's worth remembering, therefore, exactly how Donald Trump won in 2016. Trump was a disruption to the status quo (he still is, even if the Republican Party is basically his mirror at this point), and he was able to pinpoint one specific thing about his opponent (in this case, Hillary Clinton's emails) that the media also made it impossible for her to move on from, much the same as Biden and his age. But Trump was also able to run as something of a populist in 2016, which we forget now but was a big reason why some independents voted for him in 2016, or felt comfortable abandoning Clinton for third party options (which didn't happen in 2020, when Biden was able to hold most third party candidates down).
Let's not forget-in 2016, it wasn't clear exactly how serious Trump was about some of the things he said. Most people assumed that Trump's rhetoric about abortion rights and gay rights was just talk. Trump has worked in the entertainment industry for years, and had never said much against gay people during that time, and had openly bragged about how he tried to get an abortion for his daughter Tiffany before her mother decided against it. He ran as an economic populist, one who didn't seem likely to cut Medicare & Social Security, who wanted tax cuts for the rich but also had parts of his platform that felt like they'd recognize working class voters. His most incendiary rhetoric was around immigration & his critics (specifically the "lock her up" chants), but on bread-and-butter issues, he largely stayed toward the middle. It was easy to frame Clinton as further from the center in 2016.
This is striking compared to his approach in 2024. Trump has actively talked about wanting to have a "dictatorship" on the first day of his presidency. His second term plans include an end surrogacy as a route for pregnancy, end sex education in schools, invoke the insurrection act to stop protests, end no fault divorce, & stop support for single mothers. On top of these, he appears to want a nationwide abortion ban at 16-weeks, and has vowed to punish doctors who perform gender-affirming surgery. This is not the kind of rhetoric that won him crossover support in 2016. While he has notably not joined Republican figures like Nikki Haley & Mike Pence in backing a raise of the social security and Medicare ages (Trump has flip-flopped on that enough to make it questionable if he'll stick to that assertion...particularly since cuts to Social Security & Medicare regularly showed up in his proposed budgets while president), these are hard-right, deeply unpopular viewpoints in the United States.
These appear to be some of the things that Joe Biden is running upon. Biden (and in particular, Vice President Kamala Harris) have started to get more aggressive about these positions, bringing them up in stump speeches and interviews across the country. The question remains, though, if they will stick. One of the weirdest aspects of the Trump administration is the media doesn't take his shocking & frequently at-odds-with-conventional-politics seriously. When Donald Trump said that he invited Russia to attack Europe, defying NATO (which, to quote former Rep. Liz Cheney, is "the most successful alliance probably in the history of the world," a viewpoint I share with the former Republican congresswoman), the New York Times had the gaul to use the quote "Mr. Trump did not make clear whether he ever intended to follow through on such a threat." The most prominent newspaper in the country would've NEVER given Joe Biden, or hell, someone like Nikki Haley or Mitch McConnell, that kind of out while reporting on a direct quote. When the media infatalizes Trump this way, they make it so that people don't take what he says seriously...even if it's quite clear that Trump generally pursues what he says on the campaign trail (even if not successfully), as was evidenced from 2017-21, and should be assumed will be his goal from 2025 onward. The Biden administration has an opening with these kinds of public statements, and sharp right turns in the race, to do something Hillary Clinton couldn't in 2016-take advantage of Trump's embrace of wildly unpopular domestic & foreign policy initiatives to win over middle class & suburban voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, & Georgia to get himself the upper-hand in a race that he currently remains a mild underdog. It will require, though, that Joe Biden be more prominent on the campaign trail & be willing to take this argument directly to the American public.
His presidency (and the future of democracy) may depend on it.
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