America's Great Unpopularity Contest

Yes, I'm talking about the 2024 presidential race

Unless Joe Biden drops out of the race — not likely, but still possible — the general election will be a replay of the 2020 presidential contest, but with a few consequential differences.

For one, in 2020, Donald Trump ran as an unpopular incumbent. This time around, it’s Joe Biden in the role of unpopular incumbent.

In 2020, Biden ran as the candidate who promised to restore normalcy to the presidency. But four years later, we have chaos on our southern border, inflation at the supermarket (and just about everyplace else), crime in big cities run by Democrats and a reluctance to punish criminals by progressive district attorneys, along with a war in Europe and another one in the Middle East.

So much for returning normalcy to the presidency.

Reelection campaigns generally favor the incumbent, but just about every recent poll tells us that what’s been true in the past may not hold up this time. Trump leads Biden in all of those polls — and is beating him in key battleground states, where presidential elections are won and lost.

So here’s what we have to look forward to: One candidate who tried to overturn the 2020 election and is now facing 91 felony counts, and another candidate who has given voters reason to question his capacity to serve four more years and whose approval ratings are among the lowest of any modern president seeking a second term.

Yes, in a country of more than 300 million Americans, we’ve wound up with two candidates that most Americans don’t want to see as our next president. Yet here we are. Ain’t America great?