United States presidential election of 2024

United States presidential election of 2024, American election scheduled to be held on November 5, 2024. Polls of Democratic and Republican voters have projected that the general election will pit the Democratic incumbent, Pres. Joe Biden (2021– ), against Republican former president Donald Trump (2017–21), who lost to Biden in his bid for reelection in the United States presidential election of 2020.

Background: the unique status of the 2024 election

Soon after the U.S. congressional midterm elections in November 2022, Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, and he subsequently remained by far the most popular presidential candidate among Republican voters. In 2023 Trump’s indictment on multiple state and federal criminal charges—including those related to business fraud in connection with a hush-money payment to an adult-film star, to Trump’s retention and concealment of classified documents after leaving the White House, and to his various efforts to overturn the presidential election of 2020—rendered the Republican presidential race, and in all likelihood the presidential election itself, historically unprecedented. In no other U.S. presidential contest had the leading candidate or nominee of either major party (Republican or Democrat) been under criminal indictment. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to federal and state indictments, included his participation in a conspiracy to create fraudulent slates of pro-Trump electors in certain swing states and his pressuring of Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to belatedly declare Trump the victor in that state’s election. (In addition, Trump and his private conglomerate, the Trump Organization, were found liable on civil charges of business fraud in a suit filed by the New York attorney general’s office, and Trump himself was found liable on civil charges of sexual abuse and defamation in two suits filed by the writer E. Jean Carroll.) The ensuing trials in three of the criminal cases were scheduled to begin in March and May 2024, at the height of the primary season, making it likely that Trump would need to limit or at least coordinate his campaign events to accommodate his appearances in court. (See indictments of Donald Trump.)

Trump’s conviction on any of the charges would not prevent him from taking office or force him to leave office, should he win the 2024 presidential election. If Trump were to win the election and be inaugurated before the completion of either trial on federal charges, he would presumably direct the Department of Justice to dismiss the case against him. The question of whether Trump could be inaugurated while serving a prison sentence, and whether he could be imprisoned after being inaugurated, is less clear. It is also uncertain whether Trump, as president, would have the power to pardon himself. (Even if the answer to the last question is yes, Trump would be unable to erase his convictions on state charges, should he be found guilty of any of those crimes.)

Candidates and issues

Biden announced his bid for reelection in April 2023. His campaign emphasized his administration’s success in restoring economic growth and significantly reducing unemployment from the high levels reached during the recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Democrats’ legislative achievements in the American Rescue Plan Act (2021), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021), and the Inflation Reduction Act (2022). In his campaign appearances Biden accused Republicans of planning to drastically cut Social Security and Medicare, condemned restrictions on voting rights adopted in Republican-controlled states (see voter suppression), criticized efforts by Republican state governments to limit the rights of members of the LGBTQ community, and vowed to codify the right to abortion in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) in 2022 (see Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization).

In part because the country’s economy grew at such a fast pace during the first years of Biden’s presidency (in 2021 gross domestic product [GDP] grew by 5.7 percent, the highest annual rate in 37 years), inflation—including increases in gas prices—remained a persistent problem, eventually leading the Federal Reserve (the country’s central bank) to impose an extended series of interest-rate increases. Despite wage increases and greatly reduced unemployment, worries regarding inflation contributed to a general perception that Biden was mismanaging the economy, which in turn kept his public approval rating unusually low—less than 50 percent—during most of his first two years in office.

Shortly before Biden formally declared his candidacy, two challengers announced their own bids for the Democratic nomination: Marianne Williamson, a social activist and self-help author who had been a fringe candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an environmental activist and lawyer and the son of Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. attorney general and U.S. senator from Massachusetts who was assassinated during his campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1968. Despite Biden’s low level of support among Democrats, neither alternative candidate was viewed as a serious threat to his nomination in 2024. Although Kennedy’s candidacy received national attention—and even some support from Republican donors—Kennedy himself was dismissed by many Democratic Party officials for his promotion of vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. (For example, Kennedy had falsely contended that vaccines cause autism and that the coronavirus might have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.) In October 2023 Kennedy announced his entry into the 2024 presidential election as an independent candidate.

Trump faced far more challengers to his nomination than Biden did to his: by June 2023 nearly a dozen Republicans other than Trump had declared their candidacy. They included Nikki Haley, who had served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump (2017–18) and as governor of South Carolina (2011–17); Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida (2019– ); former U.S. vice president (2017–21) Mike Pence; and former New Jersey governor (2010–18) and 2016 Republican presidential primary contender Chris Christie. As more than 50 percent of Republican voters supported Trump (and approximately 40 percent identified themselves as members of Trump’s nativist MAGA movement), most of his primary challengers avoided criticizing him directly or forcefully. They instead presented themselves as reliable conservatives who did not face any of the serious legal challenges that threatened to eliminate support for Trump among independent voters. As Trump’s indictments were handed down, however, his popularity among Republicans did not decline significantly, as his challengers had expected. Indeed, some polls showed that his support had increased or solidified.

During the remainder of 2023 Trump continued to dominate his rivals in polls of Republican voters, despite his refusal to participate in presidential primary debates sponsored by the Republican National Committee and the steady progress of the legal cases against him. A significant proportion of Republican voters continued to accept Trump’s oft-repeated (but unsupported) claims that the criminal and civil charges against him were false and politically motivated, and many reacted positively to Trump’s suggestions that he would seek retribution for the prosecutions if elected president. By the end of the year most other Republican presidential candidates, including Pence and Christie, had abandoned their campaigns. After Trump easily won the Republican Iowa caucus in January 2024, DeSantis, who had long been the second most-popular Republican presidential candidate after Trump, also dropped out of the race, leaving only one other Trump challenger, Nikki Haley.