President Joe Biden is wildly unpopular, but that fact alone is not going to gift Republicans election wins in 2024. In fact, the red flags are already beginning to fly.
Florida Democrats won the special election for state House District 35. In 2020, Biden won that district over then-President Donald Trump by 5 points. In 2022, the GOP candidate won it by 11 points. In a return to 2020 numbers, Democrat Tom Keen won the special election on Tuesday by just over 2 points.
If you think that Republicans can just sweep to victory based on Biden’s unpopularity, this is your first glaring warning sign of the cycle that this is not the case. Republicans thought exactly the same thing during the 2022 election cycle, leading to talk of a “red wave” that never materialized nationally. Notably, Florida was one of the few states where the red wave came to pass, with Gov. Ron DeSantis at the top of the ticket securing a historic victory. That means that, even in Florida, you are now seeing Republican enthusiasm wane.
There are no mitigating factors in this loss. It was an open seat where the GOP candidate spent twice as much as the Democrat. The GOP candidate, Erika Booth, was about as much of a cookie-cutter conservative candidate as you can find these days. Florida Republicans won this seat easily as they dominated the state in 2022, and now it has reverted back to a similar partisan lean as in 2020 when Republicans lost the White House and the Senate.
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This is what some conservatives have been warning about for the last few years. Trump is still electorally toxic, no matter how unpopular Biden is. Republicans could expand the map with focused conservative candidates (such as DeSantis) who draw a contrast not just with Biden’s failed policies but with his age and incompetence. Donald Trump fails on those grounds as well. That is why Republicans underwhelmed in 2022, and it is why they may do so again.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but if Republicans just assume that Trump can skate by on Biden’s poor numbers, a 2020 repeat is far more likely than the 2022 red wave that Florida Republicans enjoyed. And if that happens, with Trump at the top of the ticket, the GOP will be set back years as Democrats gain power across the country.