It’s Going to Be Biden v Trump Again
Photo by Lorie Shaull from St Paul, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0
With President Joe Biden’s recent announcement of his intention to seek re-election and Donald Trump’s domination of Republican primary polling, the stage is set for a rematch of the 2020 election. This is true even though polling shows that it is most emphatically not what voters outside the two parties want.
Let’s face it. As the sitting president, Biden was always likely to run for re-election and a sitting president is almost totally assured of winning his party’s primary. Although our current primary system is relatively new, no incumbent president has ever lost a primary. We have to go back to Andrew Johnson in 1868 to find a president who sought nomination for re-election and did not get it.
A similar argument applies to Donald Trump. Although Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020, many (if not most) Republicans still don’t understand that Biden won a free and fair election. Trump’s stolen election claims, although thoroughly debunked, have prevented the party from moving on.
Republicans are optimistic about Biden’s low approval ratings, currently at an average of 42 percent, and the fact that 70 percent of Americans believe that Biden should not run again per a new NBC News poll. What these Republicans miss is that Trump’s favorability is about 34 percent, per the same poll, and 60 percent say that Trump should not run again.
Personally, I think that Biden and Trump will face each other again. I’ve said for a long time that this is the most likely outcome. A large share of the Republican Party is still stuck on Trump despite the elites’ attempts to sell Ron DeSantis to the masses. The Florida governor just isn’t catching on and I don’t think he will.
I won’t say that Trump can’t win in 2024. After 2016, I’m not going to make any categorical statements about The Former Guy being unelectable.
I do think a Trump victory would be very unlikely, however. Trump has alienated so much of the country and his own party that it would be extremely difficult for him to repeat the fluke that sent him to the White House in 2016. America knows Trump and, outside the Republican Party, it doesn’t like him.
I can think of scenarios where it could happen though. An economic collapse might persuade independent voters to try Trump again. Biden might suffer a health crisis that leaves him unable to campaign, similar to Hillary in 2016. Or repeating Hillary’s problems, new scandals might emerge. There might be a mass psychosis that causes Americans to get on the Trump Train en masse.
But what I see as far more likely is that Biden will repeat his 2020 strategy of campaigning from the basement under the premise that it’s better to have Trump putting his foot in his mouth on the campaign trail than Biden putting his foot in his mouth on the campaign trail. Donald Trump is physically incapable of not saying anything offensive or stupid for long periods. Biden’s best campaign strategy will be to keep the spotlight on Trump and ask voters, “Do you really want another four years of this?”
The job will be much harder for Trump. Not only does he have to win over independents and some Democrats, he has to win over a significant faction of his own party. A new NPR/Marist poll found that 27 percent of Republicans do not want Trump to be president again. How do you win without the support of a quarter of your own party?
I’ve told the story before about my parents and other Trump voters from 2020 who swore that they would never vote for Trump again. It remains to be seen how many of these Republicans will stick to their guns in a Biden-Trump rematch, but I know quite a few who say they will. With razor-thin margins in battleground states, Trump can’t afford to lose these voters.
My outlook for the 2024 is that Trump gets thumped. I don’t think it will be close this time. After all, as I’ve stressed before, people know Trump and they loathe him. He will be a weaker candidate than down-ballot Republicans and Joe Biden will go back to the White House with more of a mandate than in 2020.
Although Republicans could definitely do better than Trump (or DeSantis), I’m not sure that Democrats could do better than Biden. Back in February, I considered Democratic alternatives to Biden and didn’t find anyone who was likely to keep the progressive, moderate, and minority factions together as well as the president. The party would probably be wise to stick with a proven candidate who has actually governed fairly conservatively.
Biden vs. Trump Part II “Electric Boogaloo” (my contract stipulates that anytime I say “part II” I must reference the title of the best sequel name ever) may not be the matchup that we wanted, but it is increasingly likely that it will be matchup that we get. I hesitate to say that it’s the matchup that we deserve. I hope we haven’t been that bad as a nation.
My most fervent hope is that America will deal yet another electoral loss to Trumpism and that Republicans will move past the MAGA populism that has dealt a string of electoral defeats. For now, however, they seem stuck on stupid.
I tend to agree with Andrew Klavan that Trump is the only candidate that could lose to Biden. I’m still not persuaded that Trump would get the nomination, though, or that he’s even more likely than DeSantis to do so.Report
The only way DeSantis or anyone else gets the nod is if Trump is convicted of something by primary season. As I’ve noted previously, even in a several candidate primary, Trump can win with pluralities just like he did in 2016. The elites of thee GOP are still not getting the message the base is sending them about who the base wants and doesn’t want.Report
It may be that even if convicted of a crime Republicans would still nominate Trump. Which is insanity but we’ve become used to insanity orbiting around TFG like a cloud of biting gnats.Report
DeSantis needs to pull the trigger on a campaign soon or it’s definitely going to be Orange Man vs the Crypt-keeper Part II.
First GOP debate is usually in August, so I’d say DeSantis needs to be up and running by late June if he wishes to take this seriously.Report
The big question is if all this bad news for his campaign has spooked the Governor into not running- though I suppose he’d have to return all those campaign contributions then.Report
What bad news? I can’t think of anything that would give him pause.Report
True, if he’s ignoring media, right wing media and polling (which, let’s be clear, is useless at this stage and he should be ignoring it) then DeSantis has no reason not to run. And yet… he still hasn’t announced.Report
What? What bad news?Report
Oh just long strings of Trump endorsements by GOP party members, including no small number of Florida GOP party members and a notable absence of same for Desantis. Plus the normal baseless horse race stuff from media figures saying Desantis’ popularity is plummeting. I wouldn’t recommend he not run based on that- Biden ignored it in 2019 and did fine- but one could interpret it as bad news.Report
No reason for it to worry him. I mean, I’d rather that no one endorsed Trump, but I haven’t seen any really surprising names on the list. DeSantis hasn’t announced yet, so he isn’t getting many endorsements, and I’d venture to say that the kind of person who would consider endorsing him would also consider endorsing Haley or someone else.
And since you note that the horse race stuff is nonsense, I don’t have to address that.Report
You don’t, because we’re not really disagreeing on much in this thread. Ron will announce when and if he thinks it’s advantageous. Compared to the adulation he received post November 2022 the current media tone is much more bearish but that bears truely little serious meaning.Report
DeSantis needs to get Melisandre the Red Witch on his staff so she can do to Trump what she did to Renly Baratheon.Report
It would certainly boost the campaign’s sexual capital.
Just remember to hide the kids.Report
No chance, Burt, her contract with Fox is exclusive.Report
I generally agree with your analysis David. One note- you correctly observe that a string of scandals (or a media fixation on a single scandal) could sink Biden’s campaign as it did to HRC in ’16. I agree but would observe that Biden’s administration has run a rather strikingly quiet ship with regards to scandals. Even Obama, who had a substantively clean run of terms, was bedeviled by made up scandals from the right that somewhat stuck. Biden has, what, just the “Hunter Biden Laptop” nonsense? And that is, even if you try and give it the benefit of a doubt, more a scandal directed at the media than the President himself. Could it be that the laptop blob is sucking the oxygen out of the environment for other ginned up scandals?Report
The classified documents thing is a scandal if he runs against anyone but Trump. The infant formula and children’s medication shortages hit certain families pretty hard. The withdrawal from Afghanistan definitely counts as a scandal. And the Hunter Biden story is bigger than the laptop.
ETA: Oh, yeah, and what was I thinking, the economy and inflation are largely blamed on him too.Report
Eh, the classified documents thing can arguably be considered a scandal though a pretty tiny one overall and, of course, utterly nullified by Trumps own misbehavior if it becomes Trump vs Biden.
Afghanistan, inflation, baby formula and medication and the economy aren’t “scandals”. They’re various policy outcomes which one can argue about the merits of but none of them suggest rule breaking or criminal acts by the administration.
I’m generally aware of the various, multifaceted, shifting, tin foil coated allegations around the Hunter Biden laptop, all of which are vacuous, unsubstantiated or based on vague phrases found in a cache of data that every tom dick and harry has pawed over and been able to modify. If anything of any substance could be wrung from that mess, it would have been done so long before now so we’re left, in the end, with nothing but the right whining that the media didn’t report on it right before the election the way the right obviously would have wanted them to. There doesn’t seem to be anything there.
So if the administrations rap sheet consists of a handful of classified documents that were mis-stored and promptly returned when discovered, that puts them ahead of *checks notes* every administration in my adult life and beyond running back to, what, Carter? Ford?Report
The OP is basically the conventional wisdom as it stands right now, but at least as far as the GOP nomination is concerned, I’m not having it.
I’d venture the GOP nomination is about 80-10-10, ie 80% DeSantis, 10% Trump, 10% anybody else. The conventional wisdom has turned against this hard over the last six weeks ago, enough for me question my own thoughts on the matter. But on second look, and at least for now, I’ve decided I was right the first time.
There’s a lot of reasons for this, but one that I haven’t seen anybody else mention is simply that the campaign season will turn against Trump. Trump has declared himself as a candidate, but I don’t think he has any intention of running a meaningful campaign, and he certainly hasn’t yet.
The American people have an intuitive sense of campaign season, and the rituals and drama associated with that. Candidates are expect to go to the Iowa State Fair and give a speech to fairgoers while standing on hay bales. They are also expected to visit Bill and Theresa Henrickson in Manchester NH and persuade a dozen or so activists in their living room. The debates are a part of this, but not all of it so people talking about what’s going to happen in the debates aren’t necessarily wrong, but they are probably not telling the whole story either.
In any event, this is the sort of drama that is going to make the Trump campaign not viable. It hasn’t mattered yet, because it’s not campaign season yet. But from, say August through January of next year it will be.
Donald Trump is not going to be able to generate traction in the news cycle by publishing some widely ignored quasi-tweets on Truth Social about Ron DeSanctimonious when other candidates are out there making real news at events on the campaign trail.Report
It is entirely possible you’re right Koz. Polling and campaign snapshots this far out have virtually no predictive value. Endorsements do have some predictive value and Trump has some while DeSantis has none but, on the other hand, DeSantis hasn’t formally entered the race yet.
Question for you: Did Trump participate in all this folksy campaign stuff in the run up to ’16? I honestly have no idea, I wasn’t watching the GOP primary closely at that time and I certainly wasn’t watching Trump closely.
While it feels like your predictions of the odds are lopsidedly tilted against the GOP’s former President I could see it being possibly correct if DeSantis does get into the race and no other substantive candidates do. As I recall, Trump pulled off ’16 because A) Jeb! stunk on ice and the Bush name is pure poison after W’s historically terrible presidency and B) the other significant candidates trained their fire on each other in hopes of coopting Trumps supporters last. Though now the “mainstream” Republican lane seems highly attenuated and weakened compared to the Trump lane.Report
Given the right odds, I’d bet on DeSantis’s whole political career being torpedoed by a natural disaster this year. A category 4/5 hurricane, Ida kinds of damage, the state “insurer of last resort” on the hook for billions in excess of their reserves, the rest of the property insurance companies abandoning the state, and the real estate bubble collapsing because so many people can’t afford their new premiums from the state company.
We are currently experiencing a global sea surface temperature anamoly higher than any previously recorded. Lots of energy to feed hurricanes this year.Report
I wouldn’t count on it. More likely such an event would *help* his campaign.
His response to Ian was pretty well received and a big reason for his landslide election victory a couple of months later.Report
And yet the property insurance market in his state is badly broken. Like Billions and Billions of dollars badly broken. He as governor would have to deal with that.Report
The problem existed before him. It will exist after him.
Highly doubt such an issue would have any impact in a republican primary or general election.Report
I think this is right, and it’s an important example of what I was trying to get at before.
I think the CW has internalized that DeSantis is the same as Trump except without the baggage. And he is that but still, it’s the wrong lens to be looking through.
He’s also good at things like wildlife preservation, disaster relief, education, and other parts of governance that are kinda mundane, depending on your perspective. And fwiw, he actually seems to care about those things as well.
My point is, DeSantis hasn’t campaigned on these things, yet. But he doesn’t have to because the campaign is long, and previously hidden aspects of a person or is record will surface at some point.
So, if you have the substance and the record that DeSantis has, there will come a time when it carries the day.Report
I’m leaving out those considerations, not because I disagree with you- I do, but because I both don’t know if those considerations will occur in the necessary time frame and I’m not sure if they will have the political effect you are predicting.
But I will readily say that I directly know from my work that Florida is in a special category all by itself for property financing and it’s a bad category to be in.Report
Thinly-veiled rooting for a hurricane isn’t the way we’re supposed to do politics.Report
I’m pretty sure he did, though tbh I don’t remember exactly. He certainly wasn’t running the Mar-a-Logo campaign he’s doing today.
Most importantly, the Trump _rallies_ were absolutely fresh and compelling political theater in 2016, whereas they are basically irrelevant now. He was routinely filling football stadiums back then (and now he’s lucky if he can sell out a hotel ballroom).
Of course, every candidate run his own to some degree unique race. But there shouldn’t have been any doubt from the 2016 campaign that Trump had the energy for the job. But now he’s more low-energy that Jeb ever was.Report
I don’t see any reason to anticipate a thumping. Or at the very least I don’t think the Biden admin can afford to even consider that as a possibility. No one wants to hear it but the truth is that on the GOP side, from a pure policy perspective Trump is the electable moderate. That’s true even as he comes in an extremely off-putting, corrupt, generally offensive package that creates all kinds of other negatives.
I think Biden can win again and is probably still the best possible person to do it. But take nothing for granted. The big question with Trump is how much the luster has worn off for normies open to him after experiencing the very real psychodrama that is life under his presidency. It’s no longer a hypothetical anyone can wish cast into.Report
He received more votes the second time then he did the first time.Report
That’s a fair point but I think it’s an open question of how it translates. I think one flaw in our political junkie discourse re: Trump has been to act as if every moment is still either Nov. 2016 or Nov. 2020. But time moves on, and perceptions evolve based on them. Trump’s influence on the GOP rank and file is still obvious, as is their willingness to adopt his various lies. However I’m not sure that 4 years of nashing his teeth like a sore loser looks the same to those marginal voters in the geographic spaces this election will turn on.
Now I’m not saying we should assume the best about them (really I think we should anticipate the opposite) but neither should we take it for granted that everything will line up the exact same way it did 4 years ago.Report
There is demographics too. A large number of voters have gotten older, eligable to vote or more likely to vote. Another large number of voters got too old to vote (died) or perished in covid and those two groups both have different partisan slants.
That said I agree with you that I hope the left and Biden’s own behavior is active, determined work with not a crumb of complacency.Report
There’re that. There’s also the entire covid situation and the civil unrest from the summer of 2020 moving farther into the rear view mirror and getting a little further every day.Report
Freddie is of the opinion that George Floyde to Jan 6th was the high tide of our current generation of “troubles” and I sometimes get a feeling like he may be right. It feels like some animal spirits are draining from the far left and the far right alike.Report
Oh my more optimistic days I dare to hope that’s the case.
And it’s also kind of what I’m getting at when I ask if there really is the critical mass of people necessary that want to go back to that. Don’t take that as an argument for a complacency, just an observation that Trump really brings out the worst in everyone, supporters and opponents alike.Report
Or if you’re in a really dark mood, it could mean that January 6 finally put some fear into the leftists who had been getting away with murder.Report
Heh I guess I can’t rule it out.
I like to think there is a great bubbling mass of normality out there that countenances none of it. But that could just be me being naive.Report
I’m not sure I know what this means.Report
He received more votes after four years of governance. Then he had the worst two months of any public official in our history.Report
Maybe the laptop “scandal” will come back. Seems like a re-visit would be useful to pull it up out of memory hole.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/04/25/joe-bidens-sinister-disinformation-campaign/
“The media’s role throughout the Hunter Biden saga has been dreadful. After denouncing the initial story as fake news, the mainstream outlets eventually admitted that it was legit. The New York Times took more than a year before admitting that the laptop findings were authentic……
This latest Blinken-Morell revelation is a scandal, and it should be bigger news. A presidential campaign collaborated with supposedly neutral intelligence officials and a compliant media to deceive the public, for the sake of influencing an election.”
But I’m not optimistic…..Report
You shouldn’t be optimistic, because when you cut away all the right wing fluff, nonsense and pap, the core of the allegation is simply that the data allegedly extracted from this laptop; data that passed through any number of interested hands that meddled with it, included a single email that mentioned a “big guy” who allegedly benefitted from Hunter Biden’s dealings. Since the right has, despite almost three years of desperate digging*, found absolutely no material collaborating or substantiating evidence to this allegation it seems like a total nothingburger.
*And, of course, the FBI under the Trump administration (not exactly a disinterested party) had the original unmodified laptop prior to that and found nothing as well.Report
I’m less interested in what Hunter did than what the “neutral intelligence officials” did. But, hey, how else you gonna double dip?Report
See you can fixate on that but that is entirely incidental to the core question. Firstly, they were former intelligence officials, not current ones, and second they were just writing an opinion letter about a rather obvious attempt by the right to ratfish the 2020 election the way the NY FBI ratfished 2016.
If the laptop is a nothingburger regarding Joe Biden then the media treating it like a nothingburger is, itself, a nothingburger story.Report
Hunter Biden is still under active DoJ investigation, with his attorneys meeting with DoJ as recently as last week. If there’s anything there to charge him with they will.Report
I stand by my assessment, that the 2024 election will be a close one within the same range as 2016 and 2020 and could go either way, and that the voter demographics and base turnout will be larger factors than crossover appeal or issues.
This is because the basic battlelines and party affiliations haven’t changed much in the past few years. No one is disillusioned with either candidate because Trump is giving his base still what he has always given them, grievance identity politics.
Biden is still giving his supporters what they want, which is a sense of normalcy and New Deal style progressivism leavened with modern cultural attitudes.
About the only movement I see possible is for mainstream old school Republicans, the Bulwark type of Never Trumpers to actually cross over and vote Democrat, but I don’t consider that a strong possibility.
Again, I would love to be wrong. It would be thrilling to see the yoot vote finally be decisive, or to flip Texas, or something like that. I just don’t see it as a likely outcome.Report
The best we can hope for from the Never Trump contingent is they sit it out and not vote. They will find reasons to not vote for Biden. (You will note the lack of adjective before the word “reasons” in the previous sentence. A good reason to vote for Joe Biden is “He’s not Donald Trump,” but for some reason most Republicans seem to blind themselves to that obvious truth.)Report
Hi.
I won’t vote for Trump or Biden because neither of them have the qualities I require in a president. I’m never Trump, but I’m also never pro-choice, never institutional racism, never a dozen other things that the Democrats currently espouse. Not to mention that Biden governs to the left of the average Democrat, lacks character, and clearly can’t function at a high level any more. Truth is I think Trump would govern better, and he’s horrible.Report
I mean, all the people who work for The Bulwark are voting for Biden over Trump and even DeSantis, but there are a lot of those types out in the real world who still are reticent. Even though places like suburban Dallas going from +20 Romney to +4 Biden isn’t all new younger families moving in.Report
Anybody who thought that the Democratic Party would primary Biden really doesn’t know anything about political politics. It would look really bad to nearly the entire electorate if Biden isn’t the Democratic Party nominee because it would look like the Democratic Party itself has no pride in what it accomplished over the past four years. Replacing Biden is just a sign of a lack of faith in yourself and that never looks good in politics.Report