Daniel Drezner: Thank you all. And thank you for listening to me talk. So I'm supposed to predict the 2024 election and this will be relatively easy because. Hold on. Let me make sure this works. There we go. Oh. Nope. I went too fast. There we go. Sorry about that. William Goldman, who was a very famous Hollywood screenwriter, he also wrote The Princess Bride. That would be the one that you might know. Also, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid very famously said that when it comes to Hollywood, nobody knows anything. In other words, no one knows whether a movie is going to be a hit, a flop, what have you. And the fact is, is that when we're talking about the 2024 election right now, I feel completely free in terms of making my predictions because I can so easily be wrong, because anyone making a prediction with any degree of confidence at this point is lying to you. And the reason for this is very simple. We're just too far out in terms of the process to make any kind of accurate prediction about whether or not a Democrat or a Republican is going to win. We would need to know what the economy is going to look like basically about a year from now. And while I'm sure you've heard a lot of people make these kinds of predictions, I'm also sure you're aware of the error bands in terms of those predictions. So partly it's too far out.

We also have to realize that if you think just about recent history, just in this century, if you considered what the presidential polling would look like a more than a year out, it's not all that predictive because if you really trusted that polling, among other things, you know, well, back in the 1980s, Walter Mondale would have defeated Ronald Reagan in 1984. In 2012, Mitt Romney would have defeated Barack Obama because those two presidents were polling behind in terms of their re-elections. This is even more true if you think in terms of things like primaries, because if you want to think in terms of party primaries at this point in the election cycle, in 2003, Howard Dean looked like the runaway favorite to receive the Democratic nomination in 2008. Hillary Clinton was the runaway favorite to receive the Democratic Party nomination also in 2008. Does anyone guess who the front runner was at this point in time? It was Rudy Giuliani that didn't go terribly well. And of course, in 2016, at this point, people still thought Jeb Bush was probably going to pull it out. So to be clear, no one is entirely sure who's going to win. Now, that said, let's see if this works this time. We do know a few things. Okay. And I am going to sort of go through what we can say in terms of trying to forecast the 2024 election. All right. First of all, most Americans do not want this sequel.

Okay. If you take a look at polling. All right. An NBC poll in April of this year showed that 60% of Americans don't want Donald Trump to run again and 70% of Americans don't want Joe Biden to run again. That includes 51% of Democrats in terms of this poll. So you can imagine the overwhelming enthusiasm about the fact that this is the most likely outcome in terms of who's getting the nominations. All right. And if you think this is sad, in that same month, YouGov polled people asking them what was their reaction to the likelihood of a Trump Biden rematch and really how to put this. The answers are akin to some of my worst dates ever. Okay. The modal response was exhaustion. 38%, 29% said fear and 23%. And I love this. Sadness and fear. All right. That demonstrates the degree to which folks do not want to see this kind of election take place. Nonetheless, they're not necessarily going to have a choice. That said, if you actually ask people now, who would you prefer in a head to head matchup? Trump or Biden? It is basically a statistical dead heat. All right. If you look at CNN and The Wall Street Journal, they've polled most recently in the last month, they're pretty reliable in terms of their polling. Basically, it shows, you know, both candidates are within the margin of error. One other thing we are quite certain of, though, which is in all likelihood, Democrats are going to lose control of the Senate.

The reason for this is just geography and math. All right. So the colored states that you can see, those are the ones that have Senate seats up for re-election. All right. Now, we tend to think of blue and red and think, oh, okay, So that's a red state and that's a blue state. The problem here is if you notice, West Virginia is a blue state. That's Joe Manchin. He's up for re-election. I am extremely dubious that Joe Manchin is going to get reelected. This is a state that voted for Donald Trump by more than 40 percentage points. Manchin was able to win in 2018 because the Democrats were out of power. It's going to be a harder push this time. All right. It's not just that. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown is up for re-election in what is an increasingly red state. And in Montana, Jon Tester is also up for re-election and he barely squeaked by in 2015. I'm sorry, in 2018 and in 2018. All of these Democrats had the advantage of running against a sitting President Trump in 2024. They are going to be matched to Joe Biden. So as a result, you would expect to see somewhat more difficulty in terms of them getting reelected. There's also going to be an extremely tough Senate race for the Democrats in Arizona because Krysten Sinema increasingly looks like she's going to run as an independent.

Ruben Gallego is going to run as the Democrat. But Arizona is not enough of a blue state. For Gallego to be able to win unless cinema truly collapses in terms of popularity. All right. So there's at least four seats where you have to think there's at least a 5050 shot, if not better, of the Republican taking control. The problem for Democrats is that there is almost no seat that is up for re-election or up for election where they have an advantage. If you take a look at the red state. The red states, those are the ones where a Republican is either going to be running or Republicans giving up. So we know Mitt Romney, for example, this week announced that he's not going to run again. But let's be blunt, a Democrat is not going to win in Utah. In fact, the most favorable seats for Democrats in this map are Florida and Texas. And no one thinks the Democrats have a great shot in either of those states. So in all likelihood, in 2025, you are going to see a GOP controlled Senate. Then there's just the complicating factor of Donald Trump. All right. Because he is the odds on favorite to be the Republican nominee. But, you know, Trump never does anything small. He doesn't just have one criminal indictment. He has four criminal indictments that he is going to be coping with both this fall and into next year. All right. And I'm not a lawyer, but I am fairly certain that he is dead to rights.

Guilty on the documents case, if nothing else. I mean, you know, we talk about like whether or not prosecutors will have smoking guns. All right. The prosecutors in the documents case have an entire cabinet of smoking guns. He's going to be found guilty there unless the judge somehow finds a way to bail him out. My hunch is he's going to be found guilty in at least three of those four cases. And furthermore, those cases are going to be in the news again and again and again and again. The other issue that Trump might have to deal with is this question of the 14th Amendment. So Section three of the 14th Amendment basically spelled out the notion that no one could serve in federal office if they were responsible for aiding or abetting an a violent insurrection. Now, this was created, obviously in the aftermath of the civil war, was designed to apply to those who had served in public office and then sided with the Confederacy. But does it apply to Trump's support of January the 6th? A lot of lawyers and surprisingly, a lot of conservative lawyers actually believe that this is the case. Now, it's one thing for a lawyer just to publish a law review article saying we don't think he can serve as president because of the 14th Amendment. The question is going to be how the courts and actually how state officials deal with this, because in the US Constitution it is state level officials, the secretaries of state in the 50 states who write the election rules.

If one of them deems that Trump is ineligible to be on the ballot because of the 14th Amendment, inevitably this is going to go to the court. Inevitably, it's going to go to the Supreme Court. And it's an interesting question of how they would rule, because again, on the law, a plain text reading of that Section three seems pretty clear. But then the question would be, well, how can you determine whether Trump did aid in the insurrection? And so there's enough uncertainty that I suspect, frankly, both Trump and his opponents are going to have an incentive to have the court rule on this before the election, if for no other reason that the Republicans deserve to know when they're voting in primaries, whether or not this guy can actually serve as president. Now it's worth asking, why is Biden polling so badly? All right. We're talking about on the Republican side, the leading nominee is someone who is potentially going to be found guilty on four felonies, actually, I'm sorry, 90 plus felony counts. All right. Plus, there's a question of whether or not he can actually fit in terms of, you know, qualify for being president because of the 14th Amendment. Right. Compared to that, you have Joe Biden. All right. You would think that Biden would be polling better than Trump at this point.

You know, the fact that a statistical dead heat is one of the things that is causing large numbers of Democrat officials, large numbers of pundits to frankly hyperventilate. All right. Just yesterday, David Ignatius, who's a columnist for The Washington Post, urged Joe Biden not to run again. Mitt Romney announcing that he wasn't going to run, urged Joe Biden to do the same. Why are they polling so closely? There's three reasons for this. All right. The first is just simple partisanship, polarization, Right. I don't need to tell you, the country has become increasingly polarized. All right. To the extent where Democrats only mingle with Democrats, Republicans only mingle with Republicans and so forth. The reason this matters in terms of polling is that Donald Trump has an extremely high floor despite everything that he has done. And he's done a lot. He's not going to go below 40% in terms of support because basically for Republicans, they've made it clear that if Donald Trump is their guy, they're going to back him. The second reason I'm just going to be blunt is age. All right. You've all seen videos of Joe Biden in the last year. All right. This is a guy who was never really a grape and now looks like a raisin sucking on a lemon. Okay. I want to be very clear. I've met Joe Biden twice. He's a smart guy mentally. He probably he has almost all of his faculties.

But there is no way you can watch him walk. Watching him talk without thinking. This is an old man. All right. I am more than 30 years younger than Joe Biden, okay? And I can't remember names or dates or figures. Do you want the leader of the free world to be 86 years old, which is what he would be if he gets re-elected? All right. And this is important. The other thing to realize here, and it's a fundamental it's a political science 101 is that when you talk to voters, the assumptions that political scientists make about voters is that they are what we describe as rationally ignorant. Now, rationally, ignorance sounds like an insult. It's not. All right. Rationally ignorant does not mean stupid. What? Rationally ignorant means is that most voters don't have a powerful incentive to pay attention to presidential politics. 14 months away from an election. Voters are busy people. They have jobs. They have children. They have mortgage payments. They've got reality television to keep up with. Okay. They've got to be worried that with a strike, they're going to run down the entire Netflix queue and they'll just be left with a fireplace at the end. Okay. They're not going to be paying attention to presidential politics, but will they occasionally see on their television a shot of Joe Biden again looking like a raisin sucking on a lemon? Yeah, they will. So the dominant way they are going to think of Joe Biden is that is that old guy.

And they're going to be nervous about this. Another issue is the degree to which there is or is not cognitive dissonance about the economy. And this is more interesting because by any sort of objective measure you can argue the US economy is in better shape now than it was a year ago. If you do something like, let's say, the misery index, this is what we care about in political science. The misery index just adds the unemployment rate to the inflation rate. So the lower the misery index, the better the economy. At this point in time, the US Misery Index is at its lowest point since the start of the pandemic. All right. So by any sort of objective measure. You would think the economy is doing pretty well. All right. The truth, however, is that despite this, The Wall Street Journal shows that 74% of Americans, when polled, believe that inflation moved in the wrong direction this past year. All right. You're all aware that's not true. All right. Inflation was at over 9% a year ago. And you can argue about how much it's going to go down further, but it's not 9% now. It's improved significantly. All right. The Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index survey is lower now than during the depths of the pandemic. Which again, is surprising. So what's going on with this? A couple of things. First, it depends on what your reference point is.

The economy now is better than it was a year ago. But if you look at things like the average real income of Americans, interestingly enough, it's still lower than it was in the first couple of months of the pandemic. And the reason for this was that when the pandemic hit and then the Cares Act was passed, what actually happened was, was that it was already a pretty decent economy. And then a lot of Americans got an awful lot of money in their pocket and then didn't spend it because there was nothing to spend it on at that point. Right. So when Americans say they feel poorer now than they did in, let's say, June of 2020, they're not wrong in making that statement. Also that inflation at nine plus percent. That was real. And while inflation has dropped, the price level hasn't dropped. The problem is all of those prices have gone up. All right. And so as a result, to Americans, everything looks much more expensive now than it did two years ago. And yes, inflation is, you know, tapered down to around 3%. But now for Americans, the problem is interest rates, where if you were interested in buying a house. That is a lot more expensive now than it was a year ago. And so there's a variety of frustrations. Another reason is something that my international relations colleagues and I like to call the poly crisis, for lack of a better way of putting it.

So to put it gently, the last couple of years, not just the United States, the world has been hit with a number of shocks. The pandemic. Russias invasion of Ukraine. Just this past summer. Climate change. Just this past week. This has been the weirdest September I have ever seen in Boston. I used to love September weather in Boston because it meant that all the humidity would leave. Been the opposite of that this week. All right. So in this sort of world where it really does seem like there is shock after shock after shock, most voters don't want to be told that times are pretty good. They're in a defensive crouch. Okay. Which means, by the way, that the only way that voters are going to be convinced that the economy is actually doing well is for the economy to continue to do well and eventually for expectations to catch up. Because generally speaking, when you talk to voters about the way the economy works. Expectations are always lagged. So they were very aware that inflation was really high a year ago. It's going to take a while for it to trickle in, that maybe it's not another aspect of this. And I don't want to ascribe too large a role to this, but it's something that you should consider is literally the role of financial journalism, because for the past year, if you read financial journalism. What did you learn? What you learned is there was definitely going to be a recession in 2023.

Okay. All throughout 2022, particularly the fall and winter of 2022. All you would see was Goldman Sachs predicting, you know, recession. My personal favorite was Bloomberg, which predicted with 100% certainty that there would be a recession in 2023. I remember seeing that headline and laughing. You never predict anything with 100% certainty. Never. Never do that. Okay. So with that said, oh, there is a couple of other things I want to say before I talk about my predictions. The first is, is that when we talk about polling during the Trump years, it's been weird. There's no other way to put it. It hasn't always been reliable. Trump in 2016 and 2020 overperformed his polling numbers. All right. This is why there was so much speculation about hidden Trump voters, voters who wouldn't talk to pollsters because they thought that pollsters sort of had a left wing bias. At the same time, those same poles actually were biased against Democrats in 2018 and 2022. If you remember about a year ago, everyone was talking about the bloodbath facing Democrats in the midterm elections. And in the end, pretty much the opposite happened. Yes, the Republicans gained the House, but by a razor thin margin and Democrats actually gained seats in the Senate. Okay. And so one of the things to realize is that we're sort of in a post January 6th environment, and it's possible that sort of the mojo that people associate with Trump might not be as strong as people realized and that even those people who might have been sympathetic to Trump on policy issues January 6th might have been a breaking point.

The other thing I want to stress is the degree to which there can be wild cards in all of this. Okay. First of all, there can be overreach by the GOP controlled House. We're already seeing that this week. So the announcement by Kevin McCarthy that there's going to be an impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden. It is extremely possible that the government is going to shut down at the end of this month because McCarthy can't get the votes for various appropriations bills. And also to go back to this question of health, you know, Joe Biden is 82. He's old. Donald Trump is 78. He's old, he's crazy, and he eats horribly. All right. So we don't know exactly what's going to happen. But that said gun to my head. These are the things that I do think will happen. All right. First, I do think the Trump and Biden will win their nominations. All right. Start with Joe Biden. Sitting presidents don't lose their party nominations. That's just not how it works, at least not in the last 50 years. And to put it gently, Robert F Kennedy Jr is not a serious challenger to Joe Biden. All right. So, so long as Biden runs and there's every indication that he wants to run because there is every indication that to him, his mission in life at this point is to stop Donald Trump from getting back in power.

And to be fair, he did that in 2020. He will continue to run. Some people ask me, well, what about the vice presidency? Will he replace Kamala Harris? No, he's not going to replace Kamala Harris because that's not how this works. The moment you replace Kamala Harris, you're creating way more political problems than you're solving. Donald Trump. Iran is likely to win the GOP nomination. If you take a look at any of the polling right now on the Republican side, you know, you have to give some credit to Ron DeSantis of Florida because you have to work really hard to declare your presidential campaign and then never gain any votes. And in fact, if anything, do the opposite. I mean, it is honestly impressive because if we were talking in November 2022, you could make a very plausible case that DeSantis should be the nominee. He had won Florida by 20 points. You know, everyone knew that indictments on Trump were happening. Desantis seemed to combine Trump's sort of in-your-face populist style with actually being a governor. And yet this has not translated well at all onto the national stage. Part of this, by the way, is that Donald Trump is a little better at presidential primary politics than people realized. If I had to guess how Trump would not win the nomination, I think it would be a combination of two things well, maybe three things.

The first is he actually has a medical episode. There's actually a video that came out this week of Trump giving a speech where he just sort of froze for about 15 or 20s. People claimed it was because he was overcome with emotion In the entire history of Donald Trump, he has never been overcome with emotion. So that's not it. So if people start to question his health, that's going to be a thing. But more importantly, if these indictments really do start to bleed support from him and polling shows that dyed in the wool Republicans are not happy about this. That he will lose support if he's actually convicted. And then if there is a candidate who starts developing momentum, who actually is seen as overperforming, and if I had to guess, my guess would be that it would be Nikki Haley. Then you might see the moment it becomes viewed as a two person race rather than a one person race. That's when Donald Trump will be in trouble. But that said, again, I think he's going to win the nomination. Yeah. Okay, good. All right. Why do I think Joe Biden will beat Donald Trump? A couple of reasons here. The first is, is that this is an unusual election in that Joe Biden is the incumbent. And generally speaking, when incumbents run for re-election, it's a referendum on them, but all of the polling actually suggests this is still going to be a referendum on Trump and not Biden. And this is where I really do think the January 6th effect can't be underestimated in the sense of ever since Donald Trump challenged the legitimacy of the 2020 election. His choices and his ability to move general election audiences has faded. There's a reason why the Democrats won the two special elections in Georgia on January the 5th. It was because Trump kept claiming the election was rigged. There's a reason why most of Trump's preferred candidates in 2022 wound up losing despite a political environment that should have been favorable to Republicans. And it was because a lot of these folks in Arizona, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, were running on the stated premise that they were going to rig the elections in favor of Republicans. Okay. So the fact that it wasn't just the Republicans did badly in places like California or elsewhere. Actually, they did very well in New York. But in the key swing states, the swing states that you're going to have to care about Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. The only place where Republicans did reasonably well was Georgia. And the only reason Republicans did well there was because the governor and the secretary of state were two of the few Republicans who stood up to Donald Trump and said, You lost this state.

Daniel Drezner: It was a clean election. We're not overturning it. Another argument in favor of Biden is that one of the interesting effects of the 2020 and 2022 elections and of the polling we've seen to date suggests that for a long time the argument was, even if it's worth remembering, Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, lost the popular vote by even more in 2020. But he came very close. He won in 2016. He came very close to winning in 2020 because if you looked at the pivotal states in the Electoral College, the states that gave Biden the necessary majority, his margins were narrower in those states than they were nationally. And so the argument is that if you break down the electorate by the Electoral College, well, then you're really looking at places like Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania. And Trump does better in those states. Republicans will do better in those states than they do in the general. So it's not just that Biden has to beat Trump in national polling. He's got to beat him by at least a couple of percentage points in order to squeak by in those states. What is increasingly becoming clear, though, is that actually, if you look both at the midterm results at The New York Times polling and at other state level polls.

Daniel Drezner: Biden's performance nationally actually increasingly looks like how he's performing in those states. And one of the interesting things that's going on here is that there's a lot of talk, if you look at polling about how Donald Trump is doing better with minorities than he was had in 2020 and certainly than in 2016. But minorities don't live in large numbers in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Those are overwhelmingly white states, and those are the states where Biden's ability to hold on to at least some parts of the white working class are making it harder for Trump to win. So I don't think there's a structural advantage. For the GOP. And then finally, and here, maybe this is me being optimistic. It's a question of how the economy proceeds. If you actually have that soft landing, if we're not in a recession, if inflation does not resurge, again, those lagged expectations that I talked about before will kick in. And as a result, voters will start to have more enthusiastic reads on the economy. And that should translate to Biden. Indeed, to some extent, we're already seeing the first half of that kick in. If you take a look at Gallup polling or the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey, you're beginning to see voters recognize that the economy is doing well.

Daniel Drezner: And indeed, real wages are now, you know, significantly outpacing price increases. And so that's pretty significant. This is admittedly from a low base, but it's a whether or not Biden can capture the credit. Biden will also be able to run for office, actually pointing to legitimate accomplishments. Whether you're talking about the bilateral infrastructure law, the Chips and Science Act, or the Inflation Reduction Act. There is one other thing that should be stressed, which I don't think I included here, but I should, which is the Dobbs decision. This was a decision overturning Roe v Wade and basically turning abortion to the states. Democrats have overperformed in every election at the federal level, at the federal and state level since that decision was announced. All right. This is definitely going to be a mobilizing issue for Democrats. And as a result, we'll give them some momentum. Okay. That said. By and large, you know, the GOP is probably going to win control of the Senate. In the Senate, it's just a question of math. All right. There are just too many seats for Democrats to defend short of Donald Trump getting convicted four times, still acting crazy, and Republicans still saying they're going to back him, maybe that would actually cause Democrats to hold on to the Senate.

But other way. Otherwise, in all likelihood, he's going to lose. The Democrats will lose control in the House. It's going to be tight either way, although increasingly you could argue that Democrats have reasons to be confident. First of all, there's a variety of court cases going on in terms of gerrymandering that are forcing redistricting in ways that will give Democrats more seats, whether you're talking about Alabama or New York or what have you. Second, never underestimate the ability of the House GOP to overreach. Okay. They're likely going to try to force an impeachment vote on Biden. They're going to potentially shut down the government. You know, I don't know how long Kevin McCarthy is going to last as House speaker, but an even more interesting question is, is that if Kevin McCarthy is voted out as House speaker, who replaces him? Seriously. If you know, let me know because I have no clue who can actually fashion a majority in terms of the House GOP caucus. Okay. If Biden wins. If I'm right about this. Basically you are going to see policies that are essentially a continuation of the status quo. Partially, this is because he is unlikely to control Congress. And so as a result, he won't be able to do in his second term what he did in his first two years in office. He's going to be battling a Republican Senate, a Republican Congress. Honestly, if he can prevent the government from shutting down and increase the debt ceiling, those will count as major wins for the Biden administration.

Instead, what he is likely to do is focus more on foreign policy. This is a tendency among second term presidents in general because they very often lose the legislative mojo. But another reason for this is just simple. The president controls far more in terms of foreign policy than he does in terms of domestic policy. And so as a result, one of the interesting things that's going to be that'll come out is the degree to which, if Biden gets re-elected, both America's rivals and America's allies react to it, because one of the problems that the rest of the world has right now is essentially whether or not they have to keep in mind the possibility of a second Trump term, which I'll get to in a second. But if Biden is re-elected, that dashes Russia's best hope. For an easy resolution to Ukraine, because Donald Trump has very famously said that he can resolve the entire Ukraine situation in less than 24 hours. Okay. Similarly, China probably prefers a President Trump to a President Biden because the difference between President Biden and President Trump on China is that Biden has actually been competent at executing what Trump wanted to do on China. Whether we're talking about export controls or bolstering the quad or the Indo-Pacific economic framework or what have you. What Biden has been able to do is to work with allies to make sure that he actually has his ducks lined up.

And generally speaking, Joe Biden might be the best president in this century and really the best president since George H.W. Bush to do what former Secretary of State George Shultz once described as gardening. In other words, tending to allies and making sure you weed out irritants before they become too big of a problem. Which leads us to Trump. How to put this gently. One European official analogized a second Trump term to the sequel to The Terminator. Okay. Because the second time around, Trump is going to be angrier and he's going to be less constrained. One of the things that people don't realize is that Donald Trump was actually a bad president in terms of getting what he wanted. And the reason for this was Donald Trump might have been the least politically savvy president ever elected. He had no idea what the levers of power were in Washington. He had no idea what he was doing. All right. He was the least experienced when it came to politics when he got elected. If Donald Trump wins again. The way you should think about this presidency is how he governed after he lost in November of 2020. If you remember, he fired a whole bunch of officials, created a whole number of acting level officials, tried to unilaterally withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria before his term was over, tried to fire a number of civil service employees.

And the thing about Trump is, is that he actually say what you will about him has articulated a number of plans that he wants to implement if he gets re-elected. He wants to apply a global tariff of 10% on all products, which is obviously a violation of the WTO rules. He wants to impose immigration restrictions that make his first term look positively like open borders. All right. He said he's in favor of bombing Mexico to deal with the drug war there. For all of his talk about being a pacifist and most importantly, he has the backing of the Heritage Foundation and a variety of other populist think tanks to try to purge the administrative state. If Donald Trump is elected president, he basically plans to make a lot of the civil service what is so called schedule F, And if there schedule F, that means they can be fired by the president without any civil service protections. And so as a result, you are looking at a president who would never have to face voters again, who would have a lot of burning resentments based on losing in 2020. And would have no compunction whatsoever about wreaking havoc not just on the executive branch, but also on the global economy. And on that cheery note, I think that is my last slide. Yes. Happy to take your questions.

Speaker3: Thank you for that, Dan. I thought I was depressing. Bloody hell.

Daniel Drezner: I'm sorry.

Speaker3: Okay. One of the.

Daniel Drezner: Things I've discovered about my field is that I'm in a counter cyclical profession, and business is booming right now for me.

Speaker3: I'm going to tell the questions here, but let me see if there's anyone in the room wants to fire away. Okay. Let me ask one of these quickly first. Something happens to Trump and Biden. Yeah, right. Neither of them can run. Who are the two nominate if it's not those two? Who is it.

Daniel Drezner: On the Republican side? As I said, I think it would be Nikki Haley. It is possible it could be someone else. I mean, DeSantis could recover. It's worth remembering John McCain in 2008 was the front runner. Then his campaign fell apart, but he eventually returned again. I would say it's going to be either DeSantis or Haley on the Democratic side. That would be a bloodbath. It's not going to be Kamala Harris, to be fair. Partly your scenario depends on when Biden would choose not to run. If it decides not to run now, then it's a free for all. And you're going to have Gavin Newsom get in. You probably have Gretchen Whitmer get in. You'd have other Democrats get in as well. It would be a full blown primary and they'd all be scrambling. If Biden gets the nomination and then, God forbid, dies or something like that, that would be the one scenario where it's going to be Kamala Harris. In other words, the longer Biden stays in the race, the more likely Kamala Harris would be the nominee. Because she's there. Because she's there because. Yeah, because that would be the logical thing. Yeah.

Speaker3: Okay. Yes. A question in the back.

Speaker4: Hi. So what is the information edge going to be like? Is is generative AI going to be used to spread false information or disinformation and ultimately affect the course of the election?

Daniel Drezner: Is generative AI going to be used? Yes. Is it going to matter in the election? Probably not. This is another area where I think 2024 is not 2016. In 2016, you had an awful lot of Americans getting their source of information from places like Facebook and then Twitter. But the social media landscape now, you know, it's much more Balkanized. So, yeah, you might see generative AI used. But the problem is, is that I think the only thing it's going to do is persuade people who are already persuaded. I don't think on the margins it's going to matter all that much.

Speaker3: Question here.

Speaker5: I'm interested with your first of all, thank you for your presentation. I'm interested with your overlap with your Russia-eurasia study that followed the work of Professor Timothy Snyder, who's particularly been insightful on this issue of authoritarian governments and authoritarian leading political leaders. For me, it was also instructive as a South African, to be in the audience. And I noticed a distinct difference between perhaps some Americans responding to your talk and people from other countries who've maybe had a rougher journey and know what it is to live through bad presidents. And my question goes to if you could drill down a bit more on your view on the Russia play, given that Russia gets whatever they want out of Ukraine and they've completely kind of over the cliff in terms of joining up with with other authoritarian players, whatever misinformation psyops they had, which the, you know, experimenting with in 2016 and 2020, they'll have everything on steroids in 2024. They'll play, you know, completely, you know, the maximum possible malevolent role they could play. I wonder if you could just expand a bit more on that understanding that it's not necessarily the direct impact that would have, but just disturbing the platforms and creating narratives that that distract and confuse and inevitably that can can help that that firm 40% voting block kind of outweigh others who are undecided.

Daniel Drezner: No, it's a valid question. I mean, let me put it this way. You can argue that to the extent that the disinformation campaign in 2016 succeeded, it wasn't so much that it succeeded in getting people who wouldn't have voted for Trump to vote for Trump. Where it succeeded was in depressing turnout in places that would have voted for Hillary Clinton otherwise. And there are some signals on the horizon on this about whether or not this might be the case. The youth vote right now, like demographically, you know, the the sort of shifts in the US population should be more favorable to Biden because literally every single day a young person becomes eligible to vote and an old coot who was going to vote for Trump dies. So you would think that as we keep going, that should help Biden. But the fact is, is that the youth vote, you know, in the polling that we've seen so far seems largely disaffected, largely sort of cynical, arguing that, well, is there really any big difference between Biden and Trump? Now I'm Gen X, so like I just want to scream at these kids, you young punks. What are you talking about? Which, of course, just makes me a parent. But the way I would put it is, is that in some ways the challenge for the Biden campaign and the challenge for the Democrats will be to counter that message in particular. Now, that said, the other thing, we all have to realize that what's going on in 2024 that no one was talking about in 2016 was in fact the awareness that countries like Russia and countries like China were attempting to manipulate the election. And so you can argue that sort of today's 18 year olds possibly might be even more digitally savvy than the 18 year olds of 2016. And so in that sense, I'm moderately optimistic on this front.

Speaker3: So presumably the youth votes of Biden and Trump is anyone below 75, right? That's exactly Follow up on that and similar question I do like here and then I've got one from the audience coming after OPEC plus especially Russia would appear to favor Trump if supply is cut significantly, raising gas and oil prices, would that not provide a tailwind for a Trump win? And my add on to that is, are we seeing that.

Daniel Drezner: It's a possibility, but there's a counteracting effect. Everyone forgets that part of the reason Trump wins in 2016 was that if you remember, oil prices fell pretty significantly at the end of 2014 throughout most of 2015. Now, you would think in the United States, oh, low energy prices, that's good for the economy. But it also had a very interesting differential effect because it led to an industrial recession in the Midwest. And the reason for this was that a lot of hydraulic fracturing was really taking advantage of the high oil prices. And so as a result, places like Michigan, Wisconsin, which benefited from, let's say, North Dakota, booming, wound up actually having serious recessions in the first half of 2016. So maybe I understand the logic of this, but when you drill down, interestingly enough, I'm not sure would have the sort of effect that everyone thought, you know, thinks it would, because in 2016, the opposite happened and that actually benefited Trump Drill down.

Speaker3: I see what you did there. And one final question.

Speaker6: Yeah. So in terms of the polarization of society, I was wondering like in your perspective, what would be the major causes for that polarization? Is it caused by the globalization in general?

Daniel Drezner: I think it's caused by a couple of things. I if you're really interested, I did write a book called The Ideas Industry about sort of how this is all affecting the marketplace of ideas. I think there's a couple of drivers. One. On is globalization. No denying that which has led to a decline in manufacturing employment in the United States, partially due to trade effects, but also due to the fact that you just need far fewer workers now to produce as much stuff. But there, I think, would be another powerful trend. And most of the sort of my political science colleagues who look at, let's say, what happened in terms of 2016 in the United States and in terms of Brexit in the U.K.. Was it economic effects or was it identity politics? It winds up being much more identity politics. The fact is, is that the United States is a less white country than it was 30 years ago. And so as a result, there are a lot of Americans who are not terribly keen on that fact. And that, I think, is an even bigger driver than the economic phenomenon that we're talking about. I don't want to say that the economics and globalization had no effect. It did. And one of the other things that should be borne in mind is that the increase in economic inequality from 1970s onward also had an effect. Although what's fascinating about that is that actually the last couple of years, you're beginning to see a reversal of the economic inequality effect. Most of the real wage gains that have happened in the United States in recent years have been at the lower end of the income spectrum. This is why Labor is feeling so feisty and things like the UAW strike or the Hollywood strike. And so it'll be interesting to see whether that sort of sense of alienation persists or not.

Speaker3: Dan, that was fascinating. Thank you very much. Thank you. Cheers.