There are weeks in Washington that clarify, and weeks that obfuscate. And then there are weeks, like this one, when the big picture of American politics may not change so much, but an awful lot of weird and possibly even relevant things happen. On Monday, Fox News abruptly fired Tucker Carlson, the country’s most-watched cable-news host and, aside from Donald Trump himself, the cynical firebrand most associated with the anti-establishment populism that has taken over the Republican Party. On Tuesday, Joe Biden formally launched his campaign for reëlection, citing the existential threat to democracy from Trump and his maga Republicans as the rationale for a Presidential candidacy that otherwise might make little sense, given Biden’s advanced age and lack of popularity.
By Wednesday, America’s 2024 choice was once again distilled by the split-screen news cycle into its worrisome essence: the superannuated Biden versus the nearly as old and far-more-terrifying Trump. In the White House Rose Garden, Biden hosted a rare press conference, as part of the state visit of the South Korean President, Yoon Suk-yeol. He was asked a question—
the question, really—about his reason for running, by ABC News’ Mary Bruce: “You’ve said you can beat Trump again. Do you think you’re the only one?” Biden, in a rambling reply, which went on for nearly seven hundred words, said that he had “a job to finish,” that “I feel good,” that his policies are popular, and that it would be up to the American people “to judge whether or not I have it or don’t have it.”
It was a less-than-reassuring response to an obvious question on a day that should have been an exercise in positive contrasts between the current President, hosting a democratic ally with whom he jointly strategized about how to respond to North Korea’s nuclear threat, and the former President, whose signature foreign-policy moment was sucking up to North Korea’s dictator while claiming a breakthrough nuclear deal that never existed.
But, if Biden has a tendency to stumble even on the easy pitches, Trump never fails to offer more opportunities. That same day, in a New York courtroom, Trump was reprimanded by a judge for publicly trashing one of his many accusers, the writer E. Jean Carroll, who took the stand in her civil lawsuit against Trump to describe how he raped her decades ago in a Manhattan department-store dressing room.
In theory, the attack ads should write themselves: Joe Biden, calm, cool, and collected in his trademark aviator sunglasses, governing from the center, while the Trump circus, with all its chaos and extremism, plays on. There’s a reason Presidents seeking reëlection like to hold lots of Rose Garden press conferences: that big white house in the backdrop is an effective electoral accessory. Only four incumbents since Herbert Hoover have lost their Presidential bids, Trump being one of them.
But there’s already substantial evidence that the 2024 election will not follow the script that history suggests. Trump himself is one big reason, obviously; he’s already defied history and common sense to retain his position as the Republican front-runner, despite a losing electoral record, two impeachments, and more than two centuries of precedent affirming that defeated ex-Presidents do not fare well when attempting to return to office.
More generally, these are unpredictably weird times in our politics. In Florida, Trump’s perceived chief rival for the Republican nomination, Governor Ron DeSantis, has been rapidly deflating in the polls against Trump. His latest cause hardly seems likely to win him votes—a full-scale war on one of his state’s biggest and most prominent businesses, Disney. On Wednesday, Disney sued the state, claiming that the Governor, in violation of the First Amendment, is waging an illegal campaign of retaliation against the company because he does not like “Woke Disney” and its support for causes such as L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Talk about Mickey Mouse politics. Another Trump rival, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, took to Fox News to suggest that Disney consider moving to her home state—just the kind of sniping among the also-rans that helped Trump win in 2016.
Elsewhere in Florida, Carlson briefly reëmerged from his Fox-imposed silence on Wednesday night with a direct-to-Twitter video, seemingly taped in his wood-panelled home sauna, attacking the stupidity of American political discourse. The bizarre rant, quickly viewed millions of times, added to the speculation that Carlson might emerge as a 2024 Republican challenger to Trump. “Celebrity, money, mental acuity, cynicism, pro-Putin isolationism, and an overt love of authoritarianism are a pretty strong secret sauce for the MAGA base,” Rick Wilson, the former Republican strategist turned Never Trump activist, argued on Twitter. “Celebrity got Trump the WH,” he added. “It could certainly do the same for Tucker. And spare me your ‘That could never happen. Even Trump’s GOP would never vote for a former TV host pushing white replacement theory.’ That’s PRECISELY who they’d vote for.”
Whether this is a realistic scenario or wild speculation, it was all a bit much for a Wednesday in April. At the White House, the day did not end until 11 p.m., when the South Korean President closed a state dinner in his honor by taking the stage to offer a spirited rendition of “American Pie.”
Standing behind Yoon, grinning, Biden looked as though he could hardly believe that the bizarre moment was actually happening. Which, truth be told, is pretty much how I’ve felt most days for the past eight years in American politics.Biden’s official campaign rollout was about as low-key as something that is both a genuinely big deal and a long-anticipated one could be. It consisted of little more than a short video that opened with shocking scenes of Trump supporters rampaging in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, a blitz of fund-raising e-mails, and the news that Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a granddaughter of the famed labor leader Cesar Chavez whose bust sits proudly in Biden’s Oval Office, would be named campaign manager.
While this formal declaration was neither surprising nor particularly well timed, it at least laid down a marker for a campaign whose outcome is as uncertain as any I can remember. One theme in particular stuck out: that of Biden as a fighter for “freedom.”
But, if Biden is planning a new campaign theme, so, too, are the Republicans, who also piled on this week not only against Biden but against Kamala Harris, his even-less-popular Vice-President. Nikki Haley, who said in a tweet that the prospect of a Harris Presidency was “scary,” was as crass as I’ve ever heard a politician when she went on Fox and flatly predicted that
Trump Could Definitely Beat BidenBiden would likely die in the next five years, thus making support for him in 2024 tantamount to anointing Harris. “If you vote for Joe Biden, you are really counting on a President Harris,” Haley said. Or, as Tom Cotton put it, “A vote for Biden is a vote for President Kamala Harris.”
In Washington, it is a supposition widely believed if rarely stated explicitly as such that the eighty-year-old President is running again only because of Harris’s weakness. This is true, I’m convinced, among many on the left and the right. Is Harris more of a liability than a Party that wants to deny women their reproductive freedom, that spends its time legislating against Mickey Mouse and gender-neutral bathrooms? Than Donald Trump himself? Stay tuned to the circus.
Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 Republican primary is not certain. But it now looks more than merely likely
The former president boasts more than twice as much support as Ron DeSantis, leading the Florida governor by a 51-to-24 percent margin in FiveThirtyEight’s average of GOP primary polls. No other candidate is polling above 6 percent. And the gap between Trump and DeSantis has been growing steadily wider for weeks.
Indeed, the Viktor Orbán of the Sunshine State appears to be wilting beneath the heat of the national spotlight. DeSantis presents better on paper than on television. He did manage to push a thoroughly Trumpist agenda and then win a landslide reelection in a purple state. And he also served as the national standard-bearer of conservative COVID doves throughout the pandemic. But the small-bore acts of constituent service that earned DeSantis bipartisan approval in Florida — such as wetlands restoration and raises for public-school teachers — don’t really translate to the national stage. And they certainly aren’t winning cards in a Republican primary. Meanwhile, the salience of DeSantis’s opposition to vaccine and mask mandates declines with each passing day.
Put aside all the reasons DeSantis is theoretically an appealing candidate and you’re left with all the reasons he isn’t one in reality. The man is charmless. He does not like people, and it shows. His antipathy to schmoozing and glad-handing is so powerful that he can’t be bothered to reliably return calls from billionaire GOP megadonors. He eats pudding with his fingers. Trump, an inveterate bully, has no trouble identifying his rival’s pain points and squeezing them mercilessly. This week, the Republican front-runner suggested DeSantis may soon be forced to seek “an emergency personality transplant.”
With President Biden officially announcing his reelection bid this week, we’re on track for a rematch of the 2020 election.
This has led some Republican operatives to resign themselves to Biden’s reelection. As Jonathan Martin reports for Politico, Trump’s intraparty skeptics are already trying to find silver linings in his inevitable defeat:
“It took Democrats three consecutive losses in the 1980s for the Democratic Leadership Council to finally gain traction and elevate one of their own in 1992.
Republicans would only have to suffer two White House defeats to finally move on from Trump and, in the meantime, there’s that Supreme Court majority he helped deliver as the political backstop.
As a shrewd Republican strategist, and no NeverTrumper, put it to me recently: “We’re just going to have to go into the basement, ride out the tornado and come back up when it’s over to rebuild the neighborhood.”
I wish this strategist’s fatalism were well founded. But I really don’t think it is.
Without question, Trump is an exceptionally weak general-election candidate. To no small extent, his personal odiousness does much of the Democratic Party’s persuasion-and-mobilization work for it. For a significant number of swing-state suburbanites, Trump’s presence on the GOP ticket is sufficient cause for supporting the Democratic one. This reality is reflected not only in 2020 voting patterns but also in the underperformance of Trump-y candidates in swing states last year. Meanwhile, Trump did more in 2018 and 2020 to increase turnout among the Democratic base than countless get-out-the-vote initiatives ever did.
there is reason to believe Trump’s odds of victory in 2024 would be at least as good as his odds in 2020, when he came within 45,000 well-placed votes of winning.
It is easy to miss just how narrowly Trump lost his matchup against Biden. The Democrat won the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points and secured 36 more Electoral College votes than the 270 necessary. But his margins in the pivotal swing states were tiny. In the tipping-point state of Wisconsin, just 20,682 votes separated Biden from Trump. If Biden had won the popular vote by “only” 4 points, Trump likely would have won reelection.
It’s possible the Electoral College is less biased against Democrats today than it was in 2020. The overturning of Roe v. Wade seems to have reminded some secular white voters in the Midwest why they used to oppose the party of Bible thumpers. In 2022, Democrats did better in key Michigan and Pennsylvania races than they did nationally. But, as a general rule, the most recent presidential election is a better guide to the geographic distribution of party support than the most recent midterm. Thus, a reasonable default assumption is that if Biden wins the popular vote by only 3 points next year, he will lose reelection.
And Biden is much less popular now than he was on Election Day in 2020.
What’s more, there is reason to fear that Biden’s economic record will get worse before it gets better.
Judging by the spread between the three-month and ten-year U.S. Treasury rates, markets believe there is a nearly 58 percent chance of the U.S. entering a recession by March 2024. Thursday’s lower-than-expected GDP numbers lend credence to that forecast.
But even if the pace of inflation were to slow down, the level of many salient prices would remain noticeably higher than they were under Trump.
Biden’s other liability — his extraordinarily advanced age — is of course going to get only more pronounced between now and November 2024. Biden’s status as an 80-year-old is less of a liability against a 76-year-old Trump than it is against a 44-year-old DeSantis. But the president does come across as distinctly older than his makeup-and-tanner-drenched rival.
Finally, even though Trump has myriad demerits as a general-election candidate, he isn’t devoid of peculiar strengths. The mogul is far less wedded to the conservative movement’s ideological project than many of his rivals. Unlike DeSantis, Trump has never endorsed the privatization of Social Security. And, to this point, he has been less acquiescent to the anti-abortion movement’s maximalist demands than the Florida governor has. Last week, the Trump campaign leaked word that the candidate considers a national abortion ban a vote loser and would be unlikely to support one. The less competitive DeSantis becomes, the more likely it is Trump will be able to avoid moving any further right on abortion policy.
In sum, Biden is lucky the Republican Party probably can’t help renominating a proven loser. But he isn’t that lucky.
Overall I thought it was a good analysis.
The reminder about the electoral college was needed.
Foreign policy was not mentioned, it should have been. I understand the reasoning behind that, Americans are more insular then most of the world. But if things go very bad lets say in Ukraine or Taiwan Biden will probably lose. Remember Biden’s unpopularity started in a big way after America’s humiliation in Afghanistan and has never recovered.
What about the culture war? Abortion is always mentioned in these articles rightly so but what about trans and book bans? While many swing voters do not like wokeness and think “trans ideology” is harmful a lot of these same voters are going to be turned off by book bans on trans and race issues, by the bullying of elected trans legislators.
Yes the age factor. It is baked in at this point. If he stays steady or gradually declines it won’t become more of a factor. A significant incident or a rapid decline then all bets are off. Will being being forced out more to campaign be a trigger a health crises or obvious rapid cognitive decline? If he does a very minimal campaign, that will be noticed. And Biden is not the only old guy.
The biggest unknown is Trump probably facing multiple indictments.
The title of this article is “Trump Could Definitely Beat Biden”. I agree with that but I also think the Biden could win comfortably if not by a landslide.
26 Apr 2023, 11:53 am
for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.
