Pundits and commentators have found different issues and factors on which to focus when looking ahead to the 2024 presidential election – usually reflecting their own biases in their analysis and conclusions.  With my bias toward inevitable decline, I’m guilty of the same in earlier essays I’ve written in these pages about the next presidential election.

Some writers focus on the Republican efforts to suppress the vote and take control of the mechanisms by which elections are run, votes are counted, and delegates to the electoral college are selected.  Others write that Joe Biden will be re-elected if he can get his infrastructure and social spending agenda through congress and signed into law.  And that he will lose the next election if he fails.

But these are side shows.  Turnout – with or without voter suppression and election manipulation – will determine whether Trump or Biden is re-elected.  And Biden’s agenda will cost him whether it passes or not.  As I’ve written before in these pages, there are tens of millions of voters who oppose government spending because they believe it goes to the undeserving — people unlike themselves.  They will be motivated to vote against Biden if his spending agenda becomes law.  If Biden’s agenda dies in congress, tens of millions will vote against him because the Democrats will have failed to keep their 2020 election promises to them, and will have accomplished nothing during Biden’s tenure.  Pass it or don’t pass it.  Biden’s agenda works against him.

All of this is a parlor game for bored pundits.  Only one issue will matter in 2024:  The covid-19 pandemic.

Had there been no covid-19 pandemic, Donald Trump would have been re-elected easily in 2020.  But Trump mishandled the pandemic, and his ineptitude tanked the economy.  He was done.  Joe Biden was elected to do one thing:  End the pandemic.

Early in his presidency when Biden appeared to be bringing the pandemic under control, and a return to normal life seemed imminent, Biden’s approval rating was comfortably over 50 percent.  When the delta variant sent cases, hospitalizations, and death rates back above what they were when Biden took office, and pandemic restrictions and mandates returned, his approval rating fell to 38 percent.  It’s the pandemic, stupid.

If in 2024, the pandemic is still raging, fights over mandates and masks continue, and voters feel that pre-pandemic normalcy has not returned, Biden will be voted out of the White House and Trump returned because voters will think that Biden is no better than Trump at pandemic management.  If in 2024, the pandemic is a thing of the past and normal life has returned, Biden will be voted out of the White House and Trump returned because the one thing that Trump failed at – the pandemic – will no longer be an issue and Trump can be returned to the presidency without the risk of further pandemic-related damage to the country and the economy.

So either way, 45 will become 47.  Trump will return.