This NBC News article is not an opinion piece so far as I can tell. Titled “5 twists that could upend Democrats’ best-laid plans for the 2024 election,” it’s intended to be a combination of prognostication and analysis, but the framing of the piece is clearly one-sided. It might as well be headlined ‘How Democrats Could Lose’ which sort of implies that Democrats aren’t supposed to lose. The natural order is for them to win. As a matter of setting up this concept, the article opens with what Democrats expect to happen:

Recognizing the stakes, and appreciative of strong economic growth on Biden’s watch, Americans dutifully put aside any misgivings about the president’s age and give him another four years in office.

But the remainder of the article explores how this could all go wrong because clearly if Democrats lose it’s because something has gone wrong. Scenario #1 is that Biden suddenly drops out.

…what if Biden takes a hard look at his poll numbers and concludes he’d rather bail than risk losing to Trump, the GOP front-runner? Or if he is feeling every bit his age (81) and no longer wants all the travel and stress that come with the job? Or if he decides the negative attention heaped on his one surviving son, Hunter, would subside if he just took himself off the ballot and retired from politics?

This would be a disaster, the piece explains, because “Vice President Kamala Harris would surely make the case that she is the heir apparent.” But the authors predict that a “white male candidate” might be tempted to challenge her and the result would be party-wide chaos. Scenario #2 is equally troublesome. What if Biden stays in the race and has a medical issue?

What if something similar were to happen to Biden? A brain freeze of some sort, a bad fall on the steps of Air Force One, a speech that devolves into gibberish — any fresh sign of frailty would reinforce Americans’ impression that Biden is too old for the job.

I’ll give NBC this much. That’s not a far-fetched scenario. It could happen before the election but I think it’s almost guaranteed to happen in the four years after the election if Biden wins. Scenario #3 is a bit strange. The authors predict Elon Musk could start a SuperPAC to take down Biden. The basis for this is this tweet from Elon’s mom.

I am the mother of @elonmusk His goal is to make this world a better place. @POTUS wants to stop him. Have you any idea how furious I am? People in other countries are proud of Elon and do not understand the US President’s motive. Please tell me how I should answer them. https://t.co/lPGcMvW5kz

— Maye Musk (@mayemusk) December 13, 2023

Seems far-fetched to me but I guess it depends on how aggressive Biden’s minions are toward Musk in the next few months. Scenario #4 involves “housing gridlock” the idea that the tail of high inflation gets felt in the housing market this spring and that results in a lot of unhappy voters who decide to take it out on Biden.

Finally, scenario #5 is that an army of foreign hackers will somehow work to take out Biden, i.e. China, Russia, Iran and others all gang up on him. Again, it’s possible. Those three countries are working together against the US these days so the collaboration seems possible. I can see how Russia and maybe China would prefer Trump or another isolationist Republican to Biden.

But I’m not convinced hacking really has the power to change a US election. This feels like a holdover from 2016 when Hillary Clinton and many other Dems convinced themselves that hackers played a role in her defeat. But the evidence was always pretty thin. Whatever impact hackers had was probably more than drowned out by the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by both sides on political advertising.

Again, the point isn’t that any of these things are impossible it’s really just the sense that a major news organization is framing the 2024 election as one Democrats should win unless something terrible and unexpected happens. Nowhere in this piece is the suggestion made, even in passing, that voters simply decide Joe Biden isn’t up to the job. Biden’s loss can only be the result of bad actors interfering with what ought to happen. This feels like a very partisan take.

And needless to say, there’s no companion article titled “5 twists that could upend Republicans’ best-laid plans for the 2024 election.” And really, you could easily write such an article if you were interested. Scenario #1: The economy improves and people forget about inflation enough to see a bump in Biden’s approval rating. Scenario #2: Trump is convicted of a crime prior to the election. And so on.