President Trump will win the presidential election by a bigger majority in 2024 than President Biden did in 2020. That’s the prediction of Speaker McCarthy, who spoke at a forum hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics this week. 

“If I look at the enthusiasm right now, Biden has a problem: young people are not there for him,” Mr. McCarthy said in conversation with a Harvard professor of Government, Graham Allison. “He doesn’t have the same coalition that has come together for Democrats in the past at the same percentage when it comes to Black Americans or Hispanics.”

The students and faculty members packing the auditorium seemed to agree. Mr. McCarthy asked the audience which candidate they would bet to win the election if it were held today. Many more hands went up for the odds of a victory for Mr.  Trump than for Mr.  Biden. 

“At the last election between these two men, President Biden won the election by 48,918 votes. His favorability rating then was plus ten. Today, it’s minus 20,” Mr. McCarthy said. “If the election was today, it wouldn’t be as close. I think President Trump would win.” 

The issues driving American voters, the former House speaker says, are abortion; the crisis at the Southern border, which is “owned by Biden”; fentanyl, the leading killer of Americans ages 18 to 40; the economy and inflation; and the war at Gaza.

GOP victory would extend beyond the executive branch, Mr. McCarthy ventures. “The Senate would flip,” he said, explaining that the seats up for grabs this upcoming election cycle will advantage Republicans. “Republicans should have won the last two cycles. They lost both of those elections, but I think they will win this. They’ve got an advantage.”

The decision of Senator Manchin, who is an incumbent Democrat, not to run for re-election leaves open a seat in West Virginia that is almost certainly going to go red. In Maryland, Democrats are wrestling over their senate nominee after a former Republican governor, Larry Hogan, jumped into the race ahead of the May primary. 

The GOP could also see a boost in the House, despite the infighting among House Republicans — which largely drove Mr. McCarthy’s ouster in October. He points to Republican-led redistricting plans in several states, like North Carolina, that could position the party to pick up at least three seats in the House this year. 

Even when Mr. Biden won more than 81 million votes in 2020, it was the first time since 1994 that not one Republican incumbent lost in the House, Mr. McCarthy says. He predicts, though, that the chamber will remain sharply divided, keeping in power one of the narrowest majorities in history. 

Mr. McCarthy’s visit to Harvard marks one of his first public appearances since he was voted out of the House speakership in October, an effort led by Congressman Matt Gaetz. Mr. McCarthy told Harvard that his ouster was “driven by one person because he’s got an ethics complaint that happened four years ago because he paid to sleep with some underage woman. But I am not going to break the law and change some ethics complaint.”

Mr. McCarthy made the same claim during an interview at Georgetown University the previous day. The Florida congressman subsequently called Mr. McCarthy “a liar” on X on Wednesday. “That’s why he is no longer speaker.”