The Bear Election

Let me explain.

I am giving a speech later today — so have been thinking a lot about how to best frame this election for people who don’t follow this stuff super closely. I wanted to give you a sneak peek at the idea. 👇

You’ve probably heard some version of the bear joke.

Two friends are hiking in the woods. They comes across a bear on their path. They freeze. One bends down, takes his running shoes out of his bag and puts them on. The other guy says “You’ll never be faster than that bear.” His friend replies: “I don’t have to be faster than the bear. I just have to be faster than you.”

Funny, right? In a morbid sort of way!

As I think about the coming 2024 election, that bear joke makes more and more sense to me as a way to understand where we are and where we are going.

Start here: The electorate is the bear. And it is angry and discontent.

There are scads of numbers that make this point.

One I like to look at is the right direction/wrong track question. It simply asks people whether they think the country is headed in the right direction or off on the wrong track. It gives us a general sense of how people are feeling about things.

Here’s how those numbers look — via Real Clear Politics:

Wrong track is CRUSHING right direction by 40 percentage points. Stunning.

Then there’s this — from a Pew poll conducted late last year: Just 4% of people believe the political system is working extremely or very well; more than 6 in 10 express little or no confidence in the future of the political system.

Or this from Axios: Three quarters of Americans (74%) don’t think their leaders care about them. Or this from The Harris Poll: 70% of people say politicians aren’t trustworthy and care more about themselves than their constituents.

You get the idea. People are unhappy — and think their political leaders are not just unable to solve their problems but also unwilling or uninterested in doing so.

So, that’s the bear. Now let’s deal with the two runners.

The first thing to know about them is that people don’t want them.

Two thirds of people in a January Reuters/Ipsos poll said they were “tired of seeing the same candidates in presidential elections and want someone new.” That same poll showed that 70% of respondents (including half of Democrats!) said that President Joe Biden should not run for a 2nd term. A majority (56%) — including one in three Republicans — said Donald Trump should not run for president again.

My favorite poll numbers to illustrate this point came in late August 2023 from the Associated Press. Voters were asked to name a word or two that came to mind for each of the front-runners for their respective party nominations.

The most common words for Biden? “Old.” “Outdated.” “Slow.” “Confused.”

For Trump, it wasn’t any better. “Corrupt,” “crooked” and “bad” led the way.

And yet….Trump and Biden are our two near-certain runners candidates in this November’s election.

The bear is going to eat (not literally!) one of them. The question is which one.

Both men have considerable — if not equal — handicaps to their ability to outrun the bear.

Trump’s handicaps are simple yet profound: He faces four indictments and 91 criminal counts for behavior he exhibited both in and out of office. There’s also this: He used the powers of the presidency to try to overturn a free and fair election in 2020 and, when that didn’t work, helped incite a riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Those issues have not bothered Trump in the Republican primary. In fact, they have helped him make the case that he is the victim of some sort of “Deep State” conspiracy to keep him from winning the presidency.

But, the GOP primary electorate is NOT the general electorate. And the people Trump needs to win over to win — suburban women, independent voters — absolutely look askance at the haze of corruption and malfeasance that permanently float around Trump.

For Biden, the issue is his age. At 81, he is the oldest person ever to be president — and the oldest person ever to run for a 2nd term. He is visibly slower — physically — than even a few years ago. His speech is, at times, halting.

The age/competency issue was super charged over the last week in the wake of special counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents that cast him as a “well meaning elderly man with a poor memory” and suggested the president couldn’t remember critical dates like when he was vice president or when his son, Beau, died.

To return to the bear metaphor, both of these runners are not functioning at optimal levels. Neither of them are as fast as they once were — or as they would like to be.

In my mind, this means that the 2024 election is very likely to be a race to the bottom — as they each try to knee cap the other rather than sprint away.

Trump has already made very clear that he will say and do anything he believes will help get him elected again. He has suggested, among other things, that Biden has no idea he is alive (what does that even mean?), can’t find his way off of a stage and is being run, like a puppet, by former president Barack Obama.

While Biden won’t go as far as Trump (no one ever will), he has also made clear that this election, to his mind, should be about two things: The threats to democracy and abortion access that Trump and the Republican party pose.

“Today, we're here to answer the most important of questions -- is democracy still America's sacred cause,” Biden asked in his speech in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania last month.

And so, here is the picture: A bear has crossed the path of the two hikers. Both hikers are hamstrung by issues. Neither is particularly quick. The race is on not to be the fastest but rather to be the faster — to be able to outrun the angry and ravenous bear.

Welcome to the Bear Election.