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Guest Essay
By Kristen Soltis Anderson
Ms. Anderson is a Republican pollster and a moderator of the Times Opinion focus group series.
A wrecking ball. A bull in a China shop. A “chaos candidate.” During Donald Trump’s whirlwind rise to the presidency, his opponents and critics frequently noted his penchant for havoc. Surely, they believed, voters would not want to steer the country toward disorder and mayhem.
The problem? In 2016, being a chaos candidate turned out to be a feature, not a bug, of American politics: Enough voters were tired of bland, establishment candidates and a system that didn’t improve their lives, and they put Mr. Trump over the top. The Trump team was so confident that these voters and the president were in sync that by the summer of 2020, one of his re-election campaign’s most oft-aired ads used those exact “bull in a china shop” words again.
But if Mr. Trump ran before as the disrupter, don’t count on him doing so a third time in 2024. Voters don’t want chaos anymore. In my assessment of the dynamics of this election, what I see and hear is an electorate that seems to be craving stability in the economy, in their finances, at the border, in their schools and in the world. They want order, and they are open to people on the left and the right who are more likely to provide that, as we saw with the rejection of several chaos candidates in 2022, even as steady-as-she-goes incumbents sailed to re-election.
And though Mr. Trump may seem a poor fit for such a moment, with his endless drama and ugly rhetoric, much of his candidacy and message so far is aimed at arguing that he can restore a prepandemic order and a sense of security in an unstable world. And unlike 2020, there’s no guarantee most voters will see President Biden as the safer bet between the two men to bring order back to America — in no small part because Mr. Biden was elected to do so and hasn’t delivered.
By 2020, some of those voters who originally took a chance on President Chaos turned to what they viewed as the safer choice in Mr. Biden. Following a first Trump term marked by tweets that threatened to set off geopolitical firestorms, the global upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic and rising domestic unrest around race, voters instead opted to send Mr. Biden to the White House with the ostensible mandate to unify the country and make politics boring again.
To be fair, Mr. Trump at times seemed to see where things were headed, and tried to paint Mr. Biden as the more chaotic of the two for a brief spell in that 2020 campaign. Back then, clearly, it didn’t work — the argument that “Sleepy Joe” was secretly going to usher in more mayhem fell flat. Even Mr. Trump’s advantage over Mr. Biden among voters in exit polls on the issue of the economy was not enough to secure victory. And on potential factors like Mr. Biden’s own health, a theme Mr. Trump relished, voters in 2020 decided that Mr. Biden was healthy enough to handle the presidency by a slim 53-47 margin. Fine, they said, give us the sleepy guy who spent the campaign in his basement — he’s better than the alternative.
Following Mr. Biden’s election, the riots of Jan. 6, 2021, cemented Mr. Trump as an agent of chaos — a routine that had run its course with voters. By mid-January, Mr. Trump’s favorability had fallen to its lowest point since he was elected president in Gallup polling. Americans wanted pandemonium no more.
Unfortunately for Mr. Biden — and for America — stability and unity did not arrive in the wake of his election. Our chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in late summer 2021 raised serious questions for many Americans about the competence of our country’s leadership. (I don’t think it is a coincidence that Aug. 15, 2021, was the last day Mr. Biden’s job approval sat at or above 50 percent, and was the day that the Taliban took control in Kabul.) And if American voters were forgiving about supply chain issues and shortages early in the Covid-19 pandemic, their patience had waned by 2022, when shelves across America looked suddenly bare in the wake of further disruptions like the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. Gas prices spiked, perceptions of crime as a problem jumped and people’s senses of order and personal safety dropped.
Americans had voted to put the adults back in charge, and instead began to wonder if the control room was simply empty.
Even today, inflation and the high cost of living remain acute concerns facing American voters and are why Democrats have lost their trust on issues like the economy. Where Democrats during the Trump presidency held a double-digit advantage on the question of whom Americans trusted more to handle immigration, that too has been lost as the situation worsens and images of thousands of migrants at the southern border continue to pile up. And it isn’t just the Republican Party; Mr. Trump currently holds sizable advantages over Mr. Biden on whom voters trust more to handle these key issues. Even on the question of who is best to “improve the tone of politics in America,” Mr. Biden’s lead over Mr. Trump is a mere six points.
Then there is the question of Mr. Biden himself as the man in charge. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Americans were concerned about Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Biden’s health in roughly equal measure; today, three-quarters of Americans are concerned that Mr. Biden does not have “the necessary mental and physical health” for a second term, far outpacing their worries about Mr. Trump’s health and even exceeding their level of concern about Mr. Trump’s legal entanglements.
Whatever advantage Mr. Biden held over Mr. Trump on the issue of who would be more likely to bring about order, stability and calm, it has surely been erased at this point. And indeed, many voters are beginning to look back longingly at the Trump era; while, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, voters say by a 30-point margin that Mr. Biden’s policies have hurt them personally more than helped, by a 12-point margin those same voters are more likely to say that Mr. Trump’s policies actually helped them.
Today, Americans are exhausted. Two-thirds of them told Pew Research Center that’s how they feel — outpacing emotions like “angry” and certainly “hopeful.” Asked to describe politics today in their own words, “messy” and “chaos” sit alongside “divisive” and “corrupt” atop the list of replies. I believe this is a key explanation for why candidates like Herschel Walker and Kari Lake, who seemed like wild cards, fared so poorly in the 2022 midterms, especially relative to other, more conventional or staid politicians, often in the very same states.
This is why, already, Trump is beginning to work to portray himself as the safer, more stable pick, and to go to great — even misleading — lengths to claim that Mr. Biden actually wants chaos and has created a world filled with more terror. He has already produced ads suggesting that Mr. Biden’s inability to lead is directly responsible for the global disorder that threatens American security, and it is a message voters have begun to echo in polling.
The 2024 election will not be fought along the conventional axis of left versus right, nor even change versus more of the same. Voters very much want change — they have made that clear with the absolutely abominable ratings they give our leadership in poll after poll. But instead of clamoring for someone to blow everything up, they are instead crying out for someone to put things back in order. Voters wanted this from Mr. Biden and clearly feel he didn’t deliver, which is why Mr. Trump currently leads by notable margins across most of the key swing states.
If this election is between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump and is fought along the axis of chaos versus stability, even given all of the drama constantly swirling around the former president, don’t assume most voters will consider a second Trump term to be the riskier bet.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a Republican pollster and a moderator of the Times Opinion focus group series.
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