Looking for pluralities, dissatisfaction

Like a lot of columns that are run between Christmas and New Year’s Day, this one is looking ahead to next year. 2024 is an election year and the most high-profile race is the Presidential race. The first few months of the year are going to be dominated by the Republican primary and with numerous polls showing the state of the race. With that in mind, I thought I would write today about the two things I’m going to be looking at: pluralities and dissatisfaction.

A majority is what 50 percent of the voters in an election vote for. In a race with only two candidates, there is a guaranteed majority outside of the mythical tie. Whoever gets the most votes will have gotten more than half of the votes cast. This is not true in elections with three or more candidates. In these circumstances, you can win with a plurality. A plurality means that you got the most votes but you did not get 50 percent of the votes cast. A lot of states have run-off elections for these circumstances but Presidential races do not have run-offs. In 1992 Bill Clinton was elected President with a plurality because of the high number of votes won by the third-party candidate Ross Perot. The Republican Primary, at least as of right now, has many candidates running.

It will be shocking if Trump loses in the early primary states but there is something to be gleamed even if he wins. I want to see if he wins a plurality or a majority in these states. Are the majority of Republican primary voters casting ballots for Trump or someone else? One of the most important moments in the 2020 Democratic primaries is when President Biden got all the remaining more moderate Democratic candidates to drop out and endorse Biden while on the left Sanders and Warren could not do the same.

If Trump is winning majorities, then an anti-Trump consolidation will probably not materialize because it would still be a losing ticket. But if Trump is only winning pluralities? That is a horse of a different color. Pluralities would mean that more Republicans are voting for not-Trump than Trump. A plurality does not necessarily mean that Trump is going to lose. At this point both DeSantis and Nikki Haley have a claim for “second place” which makes any unity difficult because both have a claim to be the candidate they unite behind, but pluralities open the door for a political shocker to occur.

The other thing I am looking at is voter dissatisfaction. There have been a bunch of polls recently that have shown voter dissatisfaction with President Biden. These polls have caused some panic among Biden supporters online, but I’m a bit more skeptical. The first thing is that dissatisfaction is a product of time. Simply put, just because I am dissatisfied with something at one point in time does not mean that I will be dissatisfied at a later point in time.

I was highly disappointed with Oklahoma State University when we lost that football game to South Alabama but I was very satisfied when we won the last Bedlam a few weeks later, and then dissatisfied when we got crushed by Texas.

There are some signs that the economy is improving and inflation is going down. Gas prices are an important metric and they are beginning to fall nationwide as well. Dissatisfaction in late 2023 does not automatically mean dissatisfaction in November 2024.

The other thing to remember is that voters can be dissatisfied with a candidate and still vote for them. That might be the takeaway of the 2024 election. A voter can think that Biden has done a poor job as President and still be unwilling to vote for Trump because they think he did even worse when he was in charge. A Republican primary voter can prefer “not-Trump” and yet still come around to vote for Trump over Biden in November. We do not vote for candidates in a vacuum. Elections are instead choices between several candidates. In that scenario, every voter looks at the options and makes a selection given the criteria. It means that in a democracy we are always choosing between imperfect choices. It is far too early to have any firm idea about whether or not people are going to select Biden or Trump in November 2024 because a lot of American voters have not begun to think about the next election yet.

I will be watching for pluralities and dissatisfaction this coming year. That is going to set the stage for the general election. Not the sexiest topics imaginable but they are the ones that I think are going to give us the clearest picture of the state of the 2024 electorate.

David Searcy holds a master’s degree from Oklahoma State University and a PhD in political science from Southern Illinois University.