US President Joe Biden had a good November with surprisingly favourable results in the midterm elections. And he is having a good February with a better-than-expected performance at the State of the Union. That’s good news for him. But whether that’s good news for his Democratic Party is yet unclear.
In contrast, former president Donald Trump seems to be having a rough winter. Ex-UN ambassador Nikki Haley is preparing to announce her presidential run; former secretary of state Mike Pompeo is setting the stage for his candidacy with a book;Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence is entertaining the idea of throwing his hat in the ring; and Ron DeSantis is quietly preparing for the national stage from his perch as Florida governor. And whether all this is better news for Trump or the Republicans — the interests of the former president and his party don’t coincide anymore — is also unclear.
What seems to be clear, however, is that the competition among Republicans is critical to shaping the prospects for the candidate of the Democrats. It is in this fog that America is heading into the electoral season for 2024.
The paradox for Democrats
For Democrats emerging from the devastating loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and a Donald Trump presidency that overturned their core political and foreign policy tenets, Joe Biden’s nomination as the party’s candidate in 2020 was based on one overriding premise — winnability. And most strikingly, Biden’s success in the Democratic primaries was because the African-American leaders of the party threw their support behind him. Because their very survival is at stake, minorities often have an uncanny sense of who is best positioned to defeat their main political adversary — and the party’s most important Black leaders such as Jim Clyburn of South Carolina saw in Biden, an older White leader with a life story and political vocabulary that could resonate with the White working-class, a more probable winner against Trump than the party’s other candidates.
Once Biden entered the Oval Office, it was assumed widely in party circles that he would be a one-term President. A 2024 run, after all, meant that Biden, already the oldest US President in history, would be 86 by the time his second term ended. The setback in the Virginia gubernatorial elections in 2021, the disgraceful exit from Afghanistan, the continued infighting between the party’s centrist and progressive wings in the US Congress, and Biden’s perceived lack of coherence and less than inspiring oratorial skills meant that the party’s favourite betting game was, “after Biden, who?”
But Biden, whose team often complains that critics have always underestimated the man who first became senator in 1973, turned the script. He first managed to push through some of the most significant legislations in recent history spanning infrastructure to climate investments to semiconductor manufacturing. His vaccination push enabled a return to normalcy. He trumped Russia by first warning that an invasion was imminent, then getting Europe on the same page, and consistently arming Ukraine to repel Moscow’s offensive over the past year. He maintained a hard line on China. And while inflation has been his biggest challenge, he managed to lead Democrats to a remarkable performance in the midterms, retaining the Senate and losing the House by a narrow margin. All of this emboldened Biden to eye a second term though he hasn’t made a formal announcement yet.
HT spoke to four Democrats — an elected representative, a Congressional staffer, a donour, and an activist with a civil liberties group. All four acknowledged that Biden is not the ideal candidate for 2024, primarily because of his age. They also acknowledged that his low popularity ratings are a cause of concern. But all four said that there was now a sense of inevitability about Biden’s nomination. “You don’t challenge a sitting president for nomination from your own party. And well, Biden has a point. He is the only one who has defeated Trump; he has defeated Republican extremists; and he has done a better job than expected. If he stands, he is the candidate for 2024,” one of them said.
A second person said that Biden’s cause is helped by the fact that there is no obvious successor. “Kamala Harris hasn’t really stepped up. There are a few governors who are interested but don’t have the national profile. If Biden had indicated he won’t stand, the primary process may have thrown up a strong candidate. But that appears unlikely now.”
Democrats are also changing their Primaries calendar, moving the first primary from the traditional site of Iowa (where Biden lost in the run up to 2020) to South Carolina (where Biden won), on the grounds that this would be more representative of the party’s diverse political base. Biden — with a mix of his electoral performance, policy record, grip over the party machine as an incumbent, the State of Union address, and the change in the primary calendar — now has, more or less, locked his party into supporting his re-election bid even as a majority of the party isn’t quite sure whether that’s a good idea.
The Republican field
While Democrats appear to have a candidate, the candidate’s prospects will depend on the party that doesn’t have a candidate yet.
Trump, expecting a Republican win in the midterms and hoping to take credit for it, pinned his announcement date for a re-run for presidency in November. The party’s relatively poor performance was however attributed largely to Trump’s rhetoric, the manner in which his politics alienated independent voters, and his selection of extremist candidates. Trump nonetheless went ahead with his announcement. While the former president is still ahead in the polls among Republican voters, his campaign is widely seen as lacking the energy of the 2016 run. The Republican donor base, the Republican media ecosystem, and Republicans on the Hill, are increasingly turning away from Trump, for they believe that the only way to defeat Biden is having a different candidate without Trump’s baggage.
That candidate, goes the conventional Republican wisdom in Washington DC, is DeSantis, the Florida governor who has adopted a far-Right cultural platform on education, race and LGBTQI rights, embraced capital, projected Florida as a land of the free when the rest of the country was under lockdown, and pulled off a big win in his state in November. At 44, the Ivy League educated, former US military veteran and ex-Congressman now represents the Republican’s brightest hope in 2024. DeSantis hasn’t announced his intent, but is climbing up in polls.
The script, however, gets complicated because if the Republican field is crowded, then there is a possibility of the anti-Trump vote getting divided between DeSantis, Pence, Pompeo and Haley and other candidates who may enter the fray, allowing Trump to squeeze through. If it is a direct Trump-DeSantis contest, there is a much higher chance of Trump losing as the Primaries process picks up.
The biggest political paradox in the US, at the moment, is this: Democrats, particularly Biden, are fervently hoping that Republicans choose Trump as their candidate, for Biden appears confident that he can defeat Trump. Indeed, Democrats backed far-right candidates even in the midterms, hoping this would alienate independent voters, as it did. But if the Republicans pick a candidate other than Trump, especially DeSantis, it would be too late for Democrats to pick anyone else and Biden may be staring at the stiffest political challenge of his long career.
