The most important election of our lifetime: 2024 edition

OPINION:

As we wander toward yet another most important election of our lifetime, there are many things worth thinking about. Will both presidential front-runners manage to stay healthy and out of jail until Nov. 5, 2024? Does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. really believe that oil and gas company executives should be jailed for crimes against humanity? What kind of Irishman has a middle name like “Robinette”? Is former President Donald Trump actually going to choose South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as his running mate?

Let’s focus on two fundamental questions for a moment: Can President Biden really be commander in chief for four more years, and have the attacks on Mr. Trump changed anyone’s feelings about him?

Many in the legacy media believe that the best way for the Biden campaign to win in 2024 is to knit together all the disparate elements of the anti-Trump efforts — the Never Trump Republicans (Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney), what remains of the moderate Democrats (Joe Manchin III, Joe Lieberman), and the folks on the legitimate left (Cornel West, Jill Stein). There is also some thought that the other part of a solution involves passing out various jobs to hangers-on like the Clintons and Rahm Emanuel as a way of conveying that Mr. Biden is not doing all this by himself — which is a gentle nod to his age.

All that seems good and well. But it doesn’t address the underlying challenges facing Mr. Biden and his advisers. First, people are (or believe themselves to be) poorer than they were before he was elected. While it is always fun to try to assign blame for such things, the reality is that the incumbent gets it all.

Second, few voters believe he is capable of doing the job of being president. Hiding him in the Rose Garden or hiring his pals to help him do his job is going to accelerate rather than change that perception.

Third, despite the earned and paid media directed at Mr. Trump over the last few years, voters seem pretty confident that a second Trump term will look a lot like the first — lots of noise and confusion, a surfeit of equal parts incompetence and hilarity, and, most importantly for voters, some economic growth salted with a general sense of things going well in the larger world (mostly because other countries are, like Americans, unsure of how much of what Mr. Trump says is bluster and what is an actual threat).

Voters aren’t worried — yet — about the legal entanglements, in part because none of them seems very serious. They know that Jan. 6 was not an insurrection. They don’t understand or care about the valuation of Mr. Trump’s company or the presence or absence of classified documents at his house. The legal cases are weak and seen as weak.

In short, voters don’t consider the former president some sort of threat to democracy. Yelling at them about it seems unlikely to change their minds.

They do, however, have grave and unanswered reservations about the economic record and the mental and physical capacity of the current president. Again, yelling at them about how good the economy is or the virility and vitality of Mr. Biden is likely to accentuate rather than alleviate concerns about both.

Let the games begin.

• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is president of MWR Strategies.