Opinion | Biden’s Path to Re-election Has All But Vanished (2024)

Carolina Moscoso

President Biden has spent much of 2024 with a more challenging path to winning a second presidential term in November than Donald Trump. But for reasons that have become glaringly obvious, that path has all but vanished.

Mr. Trump is now the clear front-runner to be the next president of the United States.

As I did for Times Opinion in April, I’ve drawn on my years as a Democratic strategist to look at polling, advertising and campaign spending in the key states in this election. As several maps illustrate below, I’ve never seen such a grim Electoral College landscape for Mr. Biden: He not only faces losing battleground states he won in 2020, he is also at risk of losing traditional Democratic states like Minnesota and New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama carried. If current trends continue, Mr. Trump could rack up one of the most decisive presidential victories since 2008.

Mr. Biden’s problems run much deeper than one bad debate. By spring, he had the lowest job approval average of any recent president seeking re-election since George H.W. Bush in 1992. His support has dropped by nearly a net 10 points since the 2022 midterm elections.

The Biden campaign hoped to change this political dynamic by calling for a historic early debate in June. What made Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance so devastating was that it reinforced voters’ strongest negative idea about his candidacy: that he is simply too old to run for re-election. In a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted after the debate, 74 percent of respondents said Mr. Biden was too old to govern another term in office.

Due to his worsening political situation, Mr. Biden now has only one narrow path to winning 270 electoral votes and the presidency in November, a more dire situation than he faced when I looked at his potential paths in April and a reality his campaign acknowledged in a strategy memo on Thursday.

If Mr. Biden cannot demonstrate that he is still up to the job of being president, and do it soon — with a vision for where he wants to lead the country — it won’t matter what the voters think about Mr. Trump when the fall election begins.

Where the Race Started

As 2024 began, the presidential campaign looked to be a repeat of the 2020 and 2016 elections, with the same battleground states determining the outcome. Not anymore.

Mr. Trump started the general election campaign this spring with a secure base of 219 electoral votes, compared with 226 votes for Mr. Biden. Either man needs 270 electoral votes to win. The race looked like it would come down to the same seven battleground states (totaling 93 electoral votes) that determined the outcome of the last two presidential elections.

Trump’s Multiple Paths to 270

Mr. Trump is in a substantially stronger position today than he was when I analyzed the race in April.

The map of states where Mr. Trump is favored has expanded. He now has a clear lead over Mr. Biden in the four Sun Belt battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. (Mr. Trump won three of these states in 2016; Mr. Biden won three in 2020.)

Biden’s Single Path to 270

Since his victory in 2020, Mr. Biden has suffered a significant decline in voter support across the board. Any state that he won by 10 percentage points or less in 2020 should now be considered up for grabs. In a sign of how much Mr. Biden’s political position has deteriorated, the map of states where he is clearly favored has contracted, for a total of only 191 electoral votes.

There are five traditionally solid Democratic states where Mr. Biden is feared to be losing, struggling or only narrowly ahead.

Each of the three states poses particular challenges for Mr. Biden. Current polling shows him trailing Mr. Trump by as many as five points in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and more narrowly in Michigan.

The deficit in Pennsylvania must be particularly disconcerting for Mr. Biden and his campaign, given the time and resources devoted to the state. He has made 10 visits since the beginning of this election cycle and has outspent Mr. Trump and his supporters on network television ads by a margin of over two to one in the last 30 days, according to an analysis by the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

Michigan poses other obstacles for Mr. Biden. It is near the bottom third of states in the country when ranked by the percentage of people with college degrees; inflation has hit Michigan working-class voters hard and influenced their views of the economy and the election. The war in Gaza has also hurt Mr. Biden among the 300,000 Arab voters in the state who overwhelmingly supported him in 2020. And third-party voters were decisive in Mr. Trump’s victory in Michigan in 2016: This year, multiple states will include Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Green Party candidate Jill Stein on ballots.

Of all the battleground states, Mr. Biden had been performing best in Wisconsin. Voters’ perception of the economy had been more favorable there than in other battleground states. However, in two polls released this week, Mr. Trump has pulled ahead of Mr. Biden. Ms. Stein is on the ballot, increasing the challenge for Mr. Biden in liberal areas like Madison.

Republicans clearly understand that these three battleground states are Mr. Biden’s only remaining path to 270 electoral votes. A Miriam Adelson-backed super PAC just committed to spending $61 million to support Mr. Trump in these three states.

A Look Ahead to November

Mr. Biden, by leveraging his support among Black and Hispanic leaders, progressives and labor unions, has so far been able to neutralize efforts to remove him from the Democratic ticket.

But he has not dealt with voters’ fundamental concerns that he does not have the physical and mental capacity to take on Mr. Trump, or to serve another full term as president.

In the upcoming weeks, if Mr. Biden is unable to excel at the basic activities of running for office — a robust schedule of spontaneous campaign events, regular television interviews and periodic news conferences — calls for his removal from the Democratic ticket will intensify.

If Mr. Biden stays in the race and fails to unify his party, it will soon be too late to change the trajectory of his campaign and the tough Electoral College map.

At that point, Democrats in Congress would likely adopt a similar strategy to the one Republicans used in 1996, when it was clear President Bill Clinton would win a second term. That year, their fall campaign centered on voting for the Republicans to check Mr. Clinton’s powers during his inevitable second term as president.

If Mr. Biden has any chance of beating Mr. Trump and not taking the Democratic Party down with him, he must demonstrate in the next few weeks that he has the mental and physical capabilities to lead the country for another term in office.

Doug Sosnik was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000 and has advised over 50 governors and U.S. senators.