That brings us to perhaps the biggest problem Biden may have matching up with Trump. Biden’s opening video and the general message from his nascent campaign is very heavy on democracy issues, abortion rights, and denouncing “MAGA extremists”. It is fair to say that this message will play best among the college-educated voters the campaign is clearly targeting.

The problem here is that working-class voters are much more numerous than their college-educated counterparts. A reasonable guess is that as a group they will be half again as large as college voters in 2024. That means that slippage in the working-class vote can have on outsize effect on the outcome.

In 2020, Trump carried the overall working class vote by 4 points. In 2022, Republicans carried the nationwide House vote by 13 points. If Trump replicated that 2022 margin in 2024, he would be very hard to beat. Absent a countervailing Democratic improvement in the college vote—which the Democrats already carried by 18 points in 2020—Trump would likely carry Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, and even Pennsylvania and Michigan. A counter trend among the smaller college-educated group could still cancel these effects out but to completely do so it would have to be larger than the working-class shift, spiking Biden’s advantage among the college-educated to over 30 points. Possible, but a very heavy lift.

Since Trump is regularly showing double digit advantages among working-class voters in trial heats and has a proven track record in attracting working-class support, the challenge for Biden’s campaign seems clear.

[This also reminds us that the GOP has to work hard to hang onto those working-class votes if someone else wins the nomination. Ron DeSantis did a good job of that in Florida, but that wasn’t in an environment in which Trump had competed and lost, either. The counter to that would be to win more suburban and female votes, but that’s not an easy lift for the GOP in any cycle. — Ed]