Rigorous modeling proves that Biden will narrowly win the 2024 election.

Mark Zandi, Brendan Lacerda, and Justin Begly, “Who Will Be the Next President?” Moody’s Analytics, January 2024, pp. 2, https://www.economy.com/getfile?q=95674FFE-7734-4401-877A-FE331AECD442&app=download.

The economy may not be at the top of voters’ minds in every election, but it is rarely less than a close second. This is the principle underpinning the Moody’s Analytics presidential election model. The model predicts whether the incumbent presidential candidate will win the popular vote in each state and the District of Columbia, and thus the necessary Electoral College votes to win the election.

This type of presidential election analysis is not new. The first was in the late 1970s by Yale economist Ray Fair. However, his seminal work was based on relating national economic conditions with presidential election outcomes. What sets apart our work from similar efforts is a focus on regional economic conditions that are the basis for state-by-state projections of the Electoral College.1 2 3

This state-level approach has an impressive, though no longer perfect, track record. It incorrectly predicted that former President Donald Trump would win re-election in 2020.4 He did not. The political fallout from the pandemic and extraordinary turnout by Democrat voters upended his re-election bid. Our model could not pick up the impact of the pandemic black swan, and while we controlled for turnout, we had assumed turnout would be historically typical.

Given the results of recent party primaries, the most likely scenario is that this election will be a rematch between current President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. While the election will almost certainly be a nail-biter, we feel confident in the model’s 2024 prediction for who will be the next president. That is, President Biden will win re-election.