Chuck Todd: The two types of voters who will decide 2024

For as long as we’ve had elections, voters have been in a running debate about whether to support the candidate who best serves their own interests or the candidate who best serves the republic as a whole. For many partisan voters, there’s no real debate: Their own interests and their beliefs about the greater good overlap quite a bit.

But voters who aren’t in love with either party or either nominee will rationalize their choices in different ways. And with a lot of voters falling into that category this year, those lines of thinking could decide the election.

Some voters will respond to aspirational appeals about what’s in the best interests of America abroad or what’s in the best interests of the country as a whole. Others will be persuaded to rationalize their votes based on pure transactional feelings: This person will keep taxes low, this person will stay out of the way of business — or, like my great-grandfather used to imply about voting in Chicago mayoral races in the ’50s and ’60s, this candidate will guarantee the garbage gets picked up — especially if the entire neighborhood shows its support for “the machine.”

In 2020, I’d argue, Joe Biden benefited from both types of vacillating swing voters, the aspirational and the transactional. The aspirational Biden voter saw the choice of a second term of Donald Trump versus a first term of Biden as a directional tell to the rest of the world about who America is and isn’t — and whether America could be a reliable ally or a rogue superpower.

The transactional voter of 2020 appeared to slightly favor Biden, too. Many of these normally right-leaning voters saw the chaos and intentional divisiveness of the Trump years (coupled with his erratic management of the pandemic)