Like so many bands of wind and rain, hurricane-strength squalls of bad news have battered former President Donald Trump all year. Since April, he’s been indicted four times, on 91 separate felony charges, compared with zero counts for all of his White House predecessors. …
President Joe Biden, by contrast, has been basking in mostly good news. Over recent months, inflation has mostly moderated, job growth has remained steady, and the stock market has recovered briskly. Seemingly every week, Biden cuts a ribbon for an ambitious infrastructure project or new clean-energy plant made possible by a trio of sweeping laws he signed during his first two years. …
And yet national polls, as well as surveys in the key swing states, consistently show Biden and Trump locked in a dead heat when voters are asked about a possible 2024 rematch between them. …
But more than structural “calcification,” as three political scientists called this phenomenon in a recent book on the 2020 election titled The Bitter End, explains the standoff in this summer’s polls between Biden and Trump. The two men are pinioned so close together also because they are caught between the four forces that have most powerfully reshaped the electoral landscape since they first met, in the November 2020 presidential election. Two of these dynamics are benefiting Democrats; two are bolstering Republicans. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic
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