Politics: Joe Biden And Donald Trump Odds For 2024 Primary Races

With the results of the midterms now in the rear-view mirror, the focus has turned to 2024 Presidential election odds. With one primary almost guaranteed to be contested and the other certainly up in the air, there’s a lot of intrigue in both Joe Biden and Donald Trump odds.

Could a sitting President really face a contested primary? Did the midterms hinder Trump's chances of being on the ticket? Let's analyze the landscape.

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• Related: overall odds to be the next President elected

Next US President Odds: Republican Primary Candidates

All candidates not listed are below $0.05, as of November 16, 2022.

Are Donald Trump odds too long as the second choice?

This has the makings of being one of the most interesting primary battles of this century.

The battle lines have already been drawn in the battle for the GOP primary, with Ron DeSantis coming out a winner from Midterm night while Donald Trump’s candidates doing badly has wounded the former President. Trump, in an effort to steal the spotlight, announced he was running for President last night, leading to increased media speculation about this primary.

The narrative that the midterms was a rebuke of Trump and Trumpism – and especially the election denialism – is nice, but fundamentally flawed. The midterms were also a rebuke of the GOP’s draconian stance on abortion by swing voters and moderates.

There is no evidence in any meaningful way that Republican primary voters have changed, based on Election Day results. Since Election Night, there have been a handful of polls – mostly paid for by the Club For Growth (who have been in a pissing contest with Trump since the 2022 Senate primaries) and are unreliable sources.

The problem with polls taken in the days after an event is that they’re functionally meaningless at predicting outcomes. Take all those polls from after January 6 that said that Republicans were fleeing Trump en masse, or the polls after the first debate in 2012 when Democratic support for Barack Obama supposedly collapsed. There’s nothing to suggest that these polls are showing real movement.

The problem with these polls is not just that, however. They’re assuming a straight DeSantis-Trump fight, which won’t exist. Even if not everyone of the Cruz-Youngkin-Pompeo-Hawley-Pence-Haley sextet run, at least a few of them will, and split the votes of those who support non-Trump “real” conservatism. Throw in the votes for whichever of the Hogan-Baker-Sununu trio of moderates run, and you’re going to see a lot of vote splitting. And that all helps Trump.

The bigger problem for the GOP is that Trump has an actual record of governance that they can’t complain about. He appointed the three justices who gave the Supreme Court an anti-Roe majority, gave the corporate wing of the GOP their biggest tax cut since Reagan, and avoided any foreign wars.

Obviously there are many problems with his tenure, namely all the chaos, but the GOP doesn't care about that. They don’t care about the ethics violations and the craziness and the tweets. They got what they bargained for out of him. And the fact that Trump did very little to calm some of a mob of his supporters that called for the killing of his own Vice President won’t matter to the Republican Party. We know this, because it hasn’t mattered yet.

His internal opposition will pretend to be deeply offended by things that they’ve supported this whole time, but it won’t matter. The base of the party likes Trump, and the people who voted for Marco Rubio or John Kasich in 2016 are now Democrats. The problem for Republicans is the voters they’ve lost in recent years are the ones they need to stop Trump.

The outflux of educated, socially liberal voters from the GOP to the Democrats means that the voters who would have voted in a GOP primary to stop Trump aren’t there.

The ones that are left aren’t exactly going to love DeSantis either, the proprietor of Florida’s "Don’t Say Gay" bill. Shockingly, social liberals with a familiarity and affection for gay people will not bail out the Governor who launched an attack on gay rights.

At the end of the day, DeSantis is running to lead a party that has always shown their preference for Trump above all else. The idea that Donald Trump odds currently show he will lose is a fiction perpetrated mostly by people who hate him and his voters. DeSantis will have to show himself to be a substantially more impressive and charismatic politician than he has shown when he gets out of Florida and starts to play politics not on easy mode.

Any Donald Trump odds not showing him as the favorite at this juncture to be the Republican nominee are mispriced.

Next US President Odds: Democratic Primary Candidates

All candidates not listed are below $0.05, as of November 16, 2022.

What if Biden runs?

There’s less certainty here about whether this will be a debate, because Joe Biden running would stop the crowd.

If Biden runs – which he says he intends to – then there won’t be a meaningful primary. At best, he will get token opposition from a diehard from the Progressive wing of the Party. If he runs again, it will more likely be a Nina Turner style of candidate – someone looking to boost their profile who poses no threat.

Biden has been insistent that he wants to run again, and he has said in the past that Trump’s candidacy makes him want to run more. The reason he hasn’t officially announced is that there are legal implications to officially announcing. If he announces, he’s subject to campaign finance laws and his ability to use Air Force One and government personnel for political events is curtailed.

For Biden, this is mostly academic – his choice to run will come down to his health and his family’s desires. As of now, there’s little to suggest he can’t do it again, or that his condition has deteriorated in any way since he won the first time.

If he chooses not to run, there’s a lot of names who could, in theory, throw their names into the mix, but everyone is underrating the obvious choice.

What if Biden does not run?

If Biden doesn’t run, Kamala Harris starts that primary as the heavy favorite. Harris has two things going for her – institutional support as the sitting VP and the fact that the Black community feels it is owed a Black nominee after making Biden the nominee.

Yes, Gavin Newsom is very clearly angling for the gig, and there are many other names who get thrown around, but all of them will run into the same wall. The South Carolina primary is plainly not going to elect another white nominee unless Harris completely and utterly shits the bed. With how much the Black community matters in a Democratic primary, there’s no chance of a nominee winning a majority without Black votes.

This makes it pretty clear – it’s Biden if he runs, and if it isn’t, it’s Harris. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of noise around this primary because people want it to be exciting.

Unfortunately, it won’t be. But Joe Biden is still better than even money.