Of course the election is a referendum on Trump

The challenger gets a lot more coverage than the incumbent

CNN recently ran a piece suggesting that the 2024 presidential election would likely be more of a referendum on Donald Trump (assuming he is the Republican nominee) than on the sitting President, Joe Biden. To which I would say, of course.

According to the CNN poll,

62% of those backing Trump said they saw their choice mainly as a show of support for him, with a similar 64% of those backing Biden saying they viewed their choice largely as a vote against Trump. Only about a third on either side treated the decision as primarily a referendum on the sitting president.

And yes, this is a pretty substantial departure from the past. Incumbent presidents are almost invariably better known than their challengers, and people have stronger opinions about the incumbent. What’s more, people tend to tie the incumbent to the conditions of the country, whether good or bad, and hold him accountable or give him credit when they cast a vote.

Trump presents an inversion of that. Of course both Trump and Biden have universal name recognition, but Trump is simply on people’s minds more. And he gets a lot more coverage! Here’s a look at how often Biden and Trump have been mentioned on the newscasts of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC throughout Biden’s presidency, according to GDELT.

In short, Trump has been getting more attention than Biden throughout most of Biden’s presidency. And that’s not surprising, for a number of reasons.

For one, Trump’s whole approach to politics is to make the conversation about him and to insert himself in national discussions whenever possible. He sought to make the 2022 midterm elections a referendum on him and did numerous rallies throughout the fall.

For another, Biden’s whole approach to politics is to be not that. He promised a presidency that people wouldn’t have to think about multiple times a day, and he has largely followed through on that. On top of that, while Democrats generally like him, they largely nominated him in 2020 because they viewed him as the candidate best able to drive Trump out of the White House. That is, even Biden’s supporters largely evaluate him with respect to Trump.

The media are going to fixate on Trump because, frankly, it’s a better story. He is pretty much guaranteed to say things that are entertaining, controversial, undemocratic, tyrannical, amusing, and more almost any day. Biden, conversely, operates from the idea that less controversy is probably better.

But even if it weren’t part of their personal styles, the very fact that this election will likely end up as a contest between two presidents, for the first time since 1912, is guaranteed to make it an unusual one, in which the normal rules for how incumbents and challengers are evaluated just don’t apply.