Why 2024 Could Totally Rule! | Opinion

If we're being totally honest, the possibilities for 2024 run the gamut between heartwarming victories for democracy and human rights to potentially republic-ending disasters resulting in a vengeful GOP trifecta led by former President Donald Trump. But in the spirit of the holidays let's think about what might go right rather than wrong and why 2024 might actually rule.

The scenario looks like this: The U.S. economy ends on a high note in 2023 and continues its charge into the New Year. With interest rates falling, inflation back to pre-pandemic levels and stocks roaring past all-time highs, there will be little left to pin on President Biden and the Democrats. The full normalcy that many hoped would arrive with the Covid vaccine rollout in the spring of 2021 will finally be here.

That will be a huge political boon to the president. In each of Biden's first three years in office there was something deeply wrong—in 2021, it was the pandemic's persistence, first with the Delta surge and then the spectacular explosion of Omicron that marred the winter of 2021-2022. Covid's stickiness was accompanied by the slow-motion economic disaster of inflation, supply-chain woes and other knock-on effects of the pandemic that left big city downtowns struggling and many Americans unable to get back on their feet. 2023 brought more interest rate hikes that succeeded in halting the destructive march of inflation, but at the cost of making borrowing for big purchases like cars and homes out of reach for too many people.

Not in 2024. The Dow Jones reaches 40,000 in March, the unemployment rate stays below 4 percent and interest rates fall back, if not to 2019 levels, at least to where they encourage new economic activity. As the reality of this economy sinks in even among hardened partisans, Biden opens up a substantial lead over Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican nominee after sweeping the Super Tuesday contests. When his remaining rivals drop out shortly thereafter, Republicans realize that they are stuck with a historically unpopular nominee whose bizarre antics and increasingly authoritarian rhetoric continue to be off-putting to the kind of normal people who are just beginning to tune back into presidential politics.

The GOP-led House of Representatives ends its "Biden crime family" farce in March after realizing that they can't draft a single credible article of impeachment against the president. Speaker Mike Johnson is toppled by dead-enders after refusing to hold a floor vote, and the whole effort collapses in humiliation. Republicans spend the spring and summer rudderless and leaderless before finally agreeing to a compromise candidate like Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) that amounts to a de facto abdication of power.

Biden gets some lucky breaks overseas, too. In January, a bipartisan aid package for Ukraine passes through Congress, dashing Russian President Vladimir Putin's hopes that America's domestic dysfunction might allow him to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. By the end of another punishing winter, Putin is openly looking for an exit strategy after more than two years of battlefield humiliation, first quietly and then with some level of desperation. After a Ukrainian counter-offensive pushes Russian defense to the brink in June, Putin agrees to withdraw his forces from all Ukrainian territory outside of Crimea as peace talks get underway.

In Gaza, the relentless Israeli military assault opens a schism between American and Israeli leadership but forces Hamas to abdicate power by February. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is compelled to first install a caretaker government led by the Palestinian Authority and then to resign as Israel's leader as the war's end leads to an immediate reckoning with the monumental security failures that led to the Oct. 7 attacks. As the dust settles on the near-total wreckage of Gazan society and infrastructure and the horrific civilian death toll, new Israeli and Palestinian leaders begin to take the first, painful steps toward reopening lines of negotiation.

Biden, whose uncritical embrace of Israel early in the war threatened to tear his party's coalition apart, takes credit for preventing the permanent expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza that Netanyahu's government sought. Not even the most blinkered optimist can foresee peace in 2024, but by the time the presidential election rolls around, there is more hope than there has been in years.

Buoyed by economic tailwinds and foreign policy successes, Biden begins to seem less like an overwhelmed, elderly man in the prodrome of dementia, and more like an accomplished, confident leader looking to create a long-term legacy for himself during his second term. As Republicans line up behind Trump—whose similarly advanced age and worsening mental limitations become their own issue during a disastrous Republican National Convention in Milwaukee—Democrats look set to inflict the kind of across-the-board defeat on the GOP that they had hoped for in 2020.

On Election Day, Biden adds North Carolina and, most shockingly, Alaska to his 2020 tally and scores a decisive Electoral College victory to go along with an 8-point wipeout of Trump in the popular vote. Democrats wake up with a 30-seat majority in the House and their Senate majority intact despite losing Joe Manchin's seat in West Virginia. With Manchin and Arizona Independent Kyrsten Sinema (defeated soundly by Democrat Ruben Gallego) out of the way, Democrats look toward the abolition of the filibuster, codification of Roe and a new opportunity to govern the country.

Is any of this realistic? Sock away a bottle of champagne and bookmark this page to revisit a year from now. You might just have the time of your life.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.