Historian Niall Ferguson said former President Donald Trump is going to win the Republican nomination and will beat Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election.
Ferguson detailed the historical data that led him to this conclusion in an article in The Spectator. Biden and Trump have low overall approval ratings but Trump polls much better on the economy. Ferguson said:
“What this suggests to me is that Joe Biden is in serious danger of following Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush into the bin marked ‘one-term presidents’. Why?
“For the simple reason that no president since Calvin Coolidge a century ago has secured re-election if a recession has occurred in the two years before the nation votes.
“It does not need to be as severe as the Great Depression that destroyed Herbert Hoover’s presidency. A plain vanilla recession will suffice.
“In the 12 months through March, total bank credit in the US economy declined in real terms.
“That rarely occurs. Since 1960, it has happened only during, or in the immediate aftermath of, a recession.
“This is the indicator to watch, along with the surveys of borrowers and lenders.
“Perhaps Peggy Noonan is right that Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is running for the Democratic nomination, can mount a real challenge to Biden.
“He has the magic name, after all, even if he is an anti-vaccine crank. Perhaps the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin was hinting at a presidential run when he issued a statement last week that declared: ‘Make no mistake, I will win any race I enter.’
“But the lesson of history is clear – the Republican frontrunner usually wins the nomination, and a post-recession incumbent usually loses the presidential election.
“Another lesson of history is that only one previous president has secured a second non-consecutive term: Grover Cleveland in 1892.
“As Jim Carville understood, ‘change’ generally beats ‘more of the same’ in America.
“But don’t let anyone quote F. Scott Fitzgerald at you.
“A second Trump act is not just possible. It’s fast becoming my base case,” he said.
Niall Ferguson is a Scottish historian who serves as the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, New York University, a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.
Ferguson writes and lectures on international history, economic history, financial history, and the history of the British Empire and American imperialism.
He holds positive views concerning the British Empire. He once ironically called himself “a fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang” following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In 2004, he was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.
Ferguson has written and presented numerous television documentary series, including The Ascent of Money, which won an International Emmy award for Best Documentary in 2009.
