Biden vs Trump, the sequel

For Antena M by: Miljan Vešović

Primary election season in the United States is in full swing. It is, so far, proceeding according to expectations. After Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, it looks very probable that the two main parties will run with same candidates as in 2020 – incumbent President Joe Biden for Democrats and former President Donald Trump for Republicans.

On the Democratic side, the challenges to Biden’s nomination have been extremely long shot to begin with. No one expected the two people who challenged Biden, Congressman Dean Phillips and self-help author Marianne Williamson, to actually wrestle the nomination from Biden. The only question was whether they can take the sizable enough chunk of primary voters from the sitting president to seriously wound him and endanger his standing in the general election.

After the New Hampshire primary – the answer to that question is a resounding “No”. Due to intra-party squabbles, Biden’s name wasn’t even on the ballot. However, he run the write-in campaign and won convincingly nevertheless. If Phillips and Williamson weren’t able to defeat the “write in” Biden, it is realistic to expect they will fare even worse against the “real” Biden. Time will, of course, tell, but it is almost certain that the current president has bagged the primaries and is moving on to the general election.

Things have been a little bit more interesting on the GOP side, though not much. In Iowa caucuses, Republicans had three main alternatives to Donald Trump to choose from. The Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, ran as a sort of “soft Trump” – culture warrior who promised to enact Trumpist policies without the chaos that follows the former president. Former US Ambassador to UN, Nikki Haley, promotes the traditional, Reaganite Republican approach – neoliberal at home, hawkish abroad. And finally, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswami presented himself as a younger, more charismatic and also more extreme alternative to Trump.

Trump, however, destroyed the competition in Iowa, winning more than 50% of the vote outright. After that, DeSantis and Ramaswami dropped out of the race and endorsed him. Haley is still fighting – she was beaten by Trump in New Hampshire as well, but by “only” 11% - the results were about 54% for the former president and about 43% for former US Ambassador to UN. Haley strategy has been to “survive” Iowa, have a respectable showing in New Hampshire and then win the next big contest – which is the primary in her home state, South Carolina.

However, according to the opinion polls, Trump is on course to win convincingly in South Carolina as well. His current lead there is between 20-30%. And even if he loses the South Carolina primary, which is unlikely, it is hard to imagine that Trump will lose the whole cycle – his national lead over Haley is even bigger than one in South Carolina, and about 70% of likely Republican primary voters support him. In politics, especially in 2024, everything is, of course, possible, but no candidate ever, either Democrat or Republican, has managed to surmount this sort of gap.

There are, however, possibilities that either Trump, or Biden, or both, won’t be on the ballot in November. For Biden, his main enemy is his age – November 20th 2024 is his 82nd birthday. Even his staunchest supporters privately admit he is old, looks frail and is, at least physically, past his prime. Biden himself hinted that he probably wouldn’t be running for the second term were there no danger that Trump would return to the White House.

Moreover, Biden’s approval rating is negative and has been for the last two and a half years, ever since messy withdrawal from Afghanistan and spread of so-called “Delta” and “Omicron” variants of Covid-19 ended his presidential honeymoon in 2021. According to opinion pools, between 55-60% of Americans consistently have a negative view about Biden’s presidency. The last incumbent president who had this sort of negative rating before reelection bid was Jimmy Carter in 1980 – and of course, Carter lost his reelection to Reagan.

It will not be, therefore, totally unexpected if Biden pulls out and opens the field for another Democratic candidate. Especially if Trump is not on the ballot in November. Trump, naturally, has no intention to pull out on his own volition. There is, however, a possibility that his legal problems might force him to do so. The former president is facing four criminal trials, there is a big probability that his company (and one of main sources of campaign funding), Trump Organization, will be banned from operating in the State of New York due to accounting malpractices, and Trump also lost a $83.3 million lawsuit against writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of raping her.

The Supreme Court of the United States will also soon decide whether Trump can be on the ballot at all – or his participation in the events of January 6th 2021 serves as sufficient constitutional grounds to ban him from running in all future elections, including in 2024.

However, provided he avoids the Supreme Court ban, even if Trump is convicted before the election and/or loses all civil cases, it still won’t formally stop him from running in November. However, both opinion polls and common sense (it is very hard to imagine someone running America from a jail cell instead of the White House) suggest that a criminal conviction would probably mean the end of Trump’s candidacy. According to opinion polls, about 30% of voters who intend to vote for Trump in November won’t vote for him if he is convicted. Without these voters, it is mathematically highly improbable, if not impossible, for Trump to win the general election.

Trump’s precarious legal standing is one of the main reasons why his last GOP primary opponent, Nikki Haley, has not quit the race yet. Haley is hoping that a respectable (if unsuccessful) showing in South Carolina and beyond together with the fact that she outlasted all other alternatives to Trump will help her make a credible case that she should be the Republican nominee if Trump’s legal woes prevent him from running after all.

However, with all this being said, the most probable outcome is still Biden vs Trump, The Sequel. It can be said with high probability that the race will be a close one. First of all, political climate in the United States is too polarized for any candidate to win in a landslide like, for example, Johnson, Nixon or Reagan did. This polarization, where people vote against other party as much as they vote for their preferred one, combined with the peculiarity of US general election system, where each state, according to election result, sends delegates to Electoral College and the College actually votes the president in, virtually guarantees an uncertain outcome.

Most of the states are either solidly “blue” (on the side of Democrats) or red (on the side of Republicans), and the election will be decided in a handful of so – called “purple” (neither red nor blue) or “swing” (can lean either way) states where margins of victory are usually small.

Secondly, both expected candidates are pretty unpopular. Among other things, Trump’s perceived authoritarian tendencies, the chaotic, scandalous nature of his presidency, his mishandling of Covid-19 pandemic, the events of January 6th 2021 and the fact that he nominated three conservative Supreme Court justices who reversed the “Roe v Wade” precedent that guaranteed access to abortion for all female Americans, as things stand now, make him basically unacceptable for the majority of voters.

On the other hand, Biden campaigned in 2020 that his presidency would bring the return to “normalcy”, bipartisanship and civility in politics, as well as that his experience would result in more favorable environment foreign policy wise. Although Biden notched several bipartisan wins (Infrastructure Act, Semiconductor Act and Inflation Reduction Act, among others) and managed to revitalize the Trans-Atlantic alliance after Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is fair to say that he didn’t succeed in bringing “normalcy”.

Internally, the politics remained polarized. Internationally, above-mentioned Russian aggression of Ukraine, as well as Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel and the consequent war and flare-up of tensions across the Middle East and the Gulf, together with increasing tensions in the Indo-Pacific, have made the foreign policy climate more treacherous, not more stable.

Moreover, even though Biden is a lifelong centrist, there has been a perception that his inner circle and the staff he appointed have been too leftist on topics such as southern border crisis, climate change, education or fight against crime, and therefore alienated large swaths of precisely the voters who his campaign targeted in 2020 – people who want “normalcy”. On the other hand – Biden’s support of Israel’s military intervention in Gaza has alienated the young, progressive and Muslim voters – who have so far also been a reliable part of his base.

All this has resulted in Trump currently having a small lead (usually within the margin of error) in the polls, despite his unpopularity and perceived negative experiences of his first presidency. In what is a worrying development for Biden, that lead extends to the “swing” states. Current chaos in the Middle East and on US border with Mexico suits the opposition candidate, Trump, as well – it makes Biden look weak, incompetent and unable to deal with mounting challenges.

Trump’s decision to campaign against the bipartisan border deal, currently being negotiated in US Senate, which would, if adopted, reenact most of strict border policies he first enacted (when he was the President), reflects the political reality described above. Trump doesn’t need Biden finding solutions now – he needs more chaos, so that he can become the President again and be the one to fix it. Having in mind that the sprawling bipartisan border act does not just cover migration, but also aid to Ukraine and Israel, Trump’s opposition to it becomes even clearer – he needs more chaos abroad, as well, so that he can portray Biden as weak and inept on the international stage.

Regardless of what happens with the border and Ukraine/Israel deal, Biden, too, has a plan. The current president’s campaign forecast is that his standing among voters will improve once it becomes clear to everyone that Trump is the alternative. He is banking on the assumption that nothing can mobilize the Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters like running against Trump and his surrogates. That assumption proved true in 2020 and 2022 (midterm elections). That is why he is campaigning on topics where Trump’s standing is the weakest – defense of democratic values against authoritarianism, promotion of minority rights and abortion access.

Biden is also hoping that the recovery of US economy after the pandemic and inflationary pressures of 2022 will soon start resonating among voters. Current economic forecasts boost that hope – inflation is weakening, unemployment is low and the raise of interest rates (to combat inflation) did not cause recession – economy is still growing.

All this, combined with the power of incumbency and the fact that Trump will likely be the opponent probably makes Biden the favorite to win, despite current opinion polls. Naturally, that doesn’t mean Trump is without chances – he has a realistic shot at being the first president to serve two non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland. The time will, naturally, tell us more – there are still nine months until the election. And in politics, especially in 2024, that is a lifetime.