USA 2024: Race Threatened for Biden and Trump

After the early Republican caucuses and primaries, Donald Trump is already close to claiming the party’s nomination for the November presidential election. In Iowa he beat Ron DeSantis by 20 points, who dropped out of the race a few days later. In New Hampshire, he stopped Nikki Haley’s rise, and he now goes into the upcoming primaries with a large lead in the polls, making it hard to expect a competitive race going forward.

Many in the party are coalescing around Trump, even as they have doubts over his strength in the general election. A vocal minority of voters, and some deep-pocketed donors, are encouraging Haley to stay in the race. Some believe that Trump could stumble because of his legal problems, and others that he needs to be stopped for the good of the country.

The antipathy between the two candidates is palpable, with the insults intensifying by the week. The former president calls Haley “birdbrain” and is pressuring her to drop out. The former UN ambassador equates Trump and Biden, calling them “grumpy old men” and questioning her opponent’s mental faculties.

Insults are par for the course when competing with Donald Trump, but the close attention given to the clash in the press risks overshadowing the conflict on substance as well. Here, the Republican party’s lingering problem comes into focus. Trump is reviving his greatest hits from 2015-2016, labeling Haley as a warmonger due to her interventionist foreign policy positions, and running television advertisements accusing her of wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security.

These messages hit home because Haley’s adopts the traditional Republican stance of focusing on reducing government spending, including on social welfare programs, and sees international politics through the lens of a global fight with the enemies of democracy: Russia, China and Iran. Trump, on the other hand, promises to negotiate peace. He says he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, and that Hamas and Iran would not have moved against Israel or the U.S. if he were in the White House. The claims are dubious, for example given his responsibility for worsening relations with the Palestinians and with Tehran, but they are credible enough to the Republican base, as he was the first president in 40 years not to start a new war.

Haley plans to stick around until at least Super Tuesday on March 5, when 15 states and one overseas territory that account for more than a third of the delegates to July’s convention will vote. But the possibility of Trump winning the nomination is already reverberating within the party. When a group of senators crafted a bipartisan compromise to address the humanitarian crisis at the southern border, Trump pressured them to scuttle it lest it provide Biden with a campaign-boosting victory. And retirements and resignations by officials who have run afoul of the former president have begun across the GOP.

Yet significant question marks remain about Trump’s own strength. Polls suggest a significant chunk of Republicans would abandon him if he were convicted of a crime, and more than 60 percent of voters nationwide say he should not be allowed to hold office again if that were to happen. On the other hand, there are signs of growing support for Trump among young people and Black and Hispanic voters, but the gains in those demographics are likely to be incremental and insufficient to overcome Trump’s toxic image with the majority of the public.

Much depends on the Supreme Court: if the justices let Trump’s trial proceed in the coming months, a conviction would badly damage his prospects. On the other hand, they could effectively delay the proceedings until after the election, leaving the choice solely to the voters on Nov. 5. And then there is the wild card of third-party candidates like RFK Jr., who could have a significant impact on the results in a handful of states.

There is another great hope for Trump, that emerged with the publication of the report by special counsel Robert Hur on February 8 about Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents after he left the vice presidency in 2017. The document established that there were no activities that merited indictment because the picture that emerged was that of “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

The words burst like a bombshell onto the American political scene. Biden is the oldest president in US history and is already struggling to combat the image of weakness and physical decline. Formal confirmation of this pre-existing impression can be very damaging for the president’s support among voters.

The president reacted forcefully, lashing out at the prosecutor’s gratuitous criticism. Democrats point out that anyone can forget the details of minor events that happened years ago and accused the prosecutor of bias, given that he was previously a Trump appointee.

But the damage has been done, and this could be a pivotal moment in the 2024 campaign, initiating a serious attempt to open the door to an alternative candidate, especially if Biden looks like a loser heading into the summer. The implications of such a move are considerable, but they needn’t be feared. Dumping a man who by then will be nearly 82 is not an attack on what he has accomplished; indeed, Biden’s success in putting industrial policy back on the agenda can be defended—and built on. Changing candidates would also allow the Democratic Party to begin to distance itself from the growing unease among progressives over support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ground invasion of Gaza, which is threatening to become a serious liability for Biden in key swing states.

The safest strategy would be to open things up near the convention, avoiding a long and divisive fight within the party. The goal should be to quickly choose the candidate who best combines the two fundamental elements for the electorate: economic populism and cultural moderation, in search of broader consensus among voters.

It is not enough to be a new or “diverse”. A proper narrative must be built to address the country’s problems and avoid a relapse into the short-sighted policies of globalization from the pre-populist era. As the results of the clash on the Republican side show, there are fundamental issues beneath the surface that often have more importance than the external image of the candidates painstakingly chronicled in the mainstream media.