The 2024 U.S. presidential election has rapidly taken shape in the last week, with decisive wins by Donald Trump in the Iowa caucuses (January 15) and New Hampshire primary (January 24). With the exception of Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, Trump’s principal opponents have all withdrawn—notably including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who was thought for a long time to be Trump’s strongest competitor. Trump’s path to the Republican nomination is now essentially uncontested, meaning that the 2024 election will (barring an extraordinary turn of events) will once again pit Donald Trump against Joe Biden. In what follows, we look at a few of the underlying elements that have clarified the race so quickly.
1. American voters are increasingly dissatisfied with President Biden’s performance, and think the economy is going in the wrong direction
A December poll from the Wall Street Journal concluded: “More than half the country now thinks Biden’s policies have done them harm and nearly as many voters think Trump’s policies helped them, a foreboding sign for the incumbent heading into a likely rematch with his 2020 foe.”
The Wall Street Journal report found that inflation had been significantly higher under Biden’s presidency, and that younger voters in particular feel helpless. So while younger American voters are more typically liberal, their enthusiasm levels are rather low. As the report points out, many elements of Biden’s coalition also have less enthusiasm than when they were all united in seeking to remove Trump from office. From the standpoint of some Democratic voters, Biden is too much of a centrist; from the standpoint of others, he hasn’t sufficiently defended law and order.
In the national polls, Trump holds about a two-percentage-point lead over Biden and has advantages in the principal “swing states” that typically decide national elections. Given the course of events in 2020, it would be foolhardy to look too far into the future, but at this point Trump appears to be gathering strength.
2. A growing border crisis is bringing epic numbers of illegal migrant crossings into the U.S.
Trump’s 2016 campaign theme of “Build the Wall” tapped into ordinary Americans’ feeling that national sovereignty, as well as their economic security, had been hurt by mass migration. Under the Biden administration, attempted illegal crossings of the U.S. Southern border have reached epic proportions. Beginning around the time of the 2020 election, the migrant wave reached nearly three million attempted crossings in 2023. Recently, even bipartisan proposals to deal with the border crisis proposed capping the number of entries at five thousand per day—which would still add up to 1.5 million migrants entering the United States annually. The burden placed by the migrant wave on American infrastructure has made a palpable impact in major cities, and voters are once again recoiling.
3. Republican voters have already indicated that Trump is the only presidential candidate they’ll accept
In this context, it’s no surprise that Trump has already notched decisive victories in the first two primaries—Iowa and New Hampshire. In the early days at the beginning of the Biden presidency, many analysts thought that Trump’s importance would recede. After all, the stain of the January 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol were replayed daily on screens across the country (and indeed the world), with the goal of permanently tarnishing Trump’s reputation. A series of criminal charges have also been leveled against Trump by prosecutors at the state and federal levels—concerning certain business improprieties as well as (according to the indictments) Trump’s attempts to alter the outcome of the 2020 election. While many Americans polled say that a criminal conviction of Trump would make them step back from voting for him, for many Republican voters the criminal charges are simply a sign that the justice system is being weaponized on political grounds—and that inspires them even more so to rally to Trump’s cause.
4. As America becomes embroiled in more military conflicts, Trump’s instincts against war could become more important
As important as U.S. foreign policy for events elsewhere in the world, it is not typically a principal driver of elections at home. That being said, Trump’s stance against the neoconservatives’ expansive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were part of what made him a distinctive candidate in the 2016 elections. Contrary to the media claims that Trump would be an irresponsible and warlike president, Trump’s presidency was a peaceful one—whether due to his perceived unpredictability, his negotiating tactics or the general sense of American strength at that time.
American enthusiasm for supporting the war effort in Ukraine has also declined. Though the U.S. has been the principal foreign provider of military supplies, that effort was expensive, and many ordinary Americans now object that the money should be directed instead toward securing the Southern U.S. border. American military supplies have also been drained, and elements of the defense industrial base have been exposed as weak. America’s ability to focus on multiple conflicts is open to question, and a Trump presidency would likely lead to a prioritization of competition with China (though Trump’s views on military conflict over Taiwan may also be less hawkish than some would suppose).
5. A Trump victory in the 2024 elections would bring an improvement to Hungary-U.S. relations on numerous levels
The Biden administration has effectively placed Hungary under a mild form of political and economic sanctions, particularly with the cancellation of the long-standing tax treaty between the two countries as well as political and diplomatic pressure at a variety of levels. In recent years, U.S. foreign policy has become even more ideological and less transactional than it had been previously. Numerous U.S. organizations also interfered in the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary elections, providing funding (to the tune of approximately USD$10 million) to organizations affiliated with opposition parties. Trump, by contrast, has been friendly to Viktor Orbán and shares similar policy stances and mindset to those of Hungarian conservatives, as well.
Written by Gladden Pappin