Jim Antle
President Joe Biden’s reelection announcement presents a test for Democrats: how long can a well-past-his-prime octogenarian cover for their failure to identify and advance young political talent? Only 26 per cent of voters want to see Biden run for a second term, according to a recent Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. That includes less than half of Democrats, though that latter number has improved since January.
Younger and more liberal Democrats are decidedly less enthusiastic about Biden than older and more centrist members of their party. A New York Times/Siena College poll last summer found that 94 percent of Democrats aged 30 and under preferred a different nominee. But no viable alternative to Biden has really emerged. Self-help guru Marianne Williamson isn’t well positioned to take on a sitting president, as when Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter in 1980 (and even that was unsuccessful). Robert Kennedy Jr. may have the family name, but unlike his father and uncles he is a fringe figure. Vice President Kamala Harris has lacklustre poll numbers. She has not especially distinguished herself in any of her policy portfolios, whether they were challenging ones like immigration or feel-good initiatives like the space program. She has for the most part moved away from the tough prosecutorial image that distinguished her as a senator and in California politics. Her softer tone has mostly been a flop, eliciting ridicule of her speeches and assorted online mockery.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was the most promising of Biden’s younger 2020 rivals. His Cabinet position was supposed to give him more relevant experience and a better perch from which to pursue the presidency than the mayorship of South Bend, Indiana, a small city. Instead he has presided over repeated disasters. It can be debated how much blame Buttigieg should rightfully shoulder for train derailments and federal aviation system hiccups. But he has neither made the situations noticeably better nor done anything else to suggest that he should receive a promotion. And Buttigieg has rather clearly played a role in botching the public relations aspect of the crises under his watch, consistent with his image as an aloof and grasping political operator. California Governor Gavin Newsom is the only major Democratic officeholder who has done much to prepare for the possibility of Biden not running. But he has done little to deter Biden from seeking a second term and did not want to even be perceived as wanting to challenge him in the primaries, despite offering frequent criticisms of Democratic leadership that implicate the president as much as anyone else.
Thus Democrats are left with Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second term, as their likeliest 2024 nominee. Barring a health setback, he is all but certain to be their general election candidate. That means for the third presidential election in a row, Democrats will need to substitute fear and loathing of former President Donald Trump for genuine enthusiasm for their own standard-bearer. It worked well enough in 2020, amid a pandemic and associated economic downturn. Trump, plus the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Roe v. Wade federal abortion rights guarantee, helped limit Democratic losses in the midterm elections. Yet this gambit failed in epic fashion in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was the nominee. And while the red wave didn’t come in 2022, it’s possible to question just how well the Democrats really did that year. Yes, poor Republican candidates, many of them handpicked by Trump, blew a number of winnable races. Democrats exceeded expectations in the most competitive states and congressional districts.
But Republicans not only won control of the House, albeit by a smaller than anticipated margin: they also won the popular vote in the House races, suggesting that even with Trump and abortion on the ballot, Democrats dodged a bullet more than they defied history. The Democratic party can barely be said to have a functional majority in the Senate and has wound up acquiescing to a few Republican initiatives already. In 2020, Biden won a large number of raw votes and improved upon Clinton’s cumulative national popular vote margin. US presidential races are nevertheless the composite of 50 state elections. Biden therefore won under ideal conditions by about 43,000 votes in three decisive states. Democrats actually lost seats in the House, which made a red wave unnecessary in the subsequent midterm elections. While Trump, with his baggage and burgeoning legal problems, is a polarizing enough figure to lose even to a deeply flawed Democratic candidate, there is no guarantee that Biden will beat him, especially if national conditions deteriorate further.
Biden receives relatively low marks for his economic stewardship in a time of low unemployment, respectable GDP growth, and cresting inflation. If a recession takes place in the next year, would anyone guarantee he will defeat Trump? It is also not certain Trump will be the Republican nominee. Biden has a plan for running against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The whole point of the “ultra MAGA” label is to transform other Republicans into Trump clones, which DeSantis has to some extent endeavoured to do himself. If DeSantis emerges as the Republican nominee, however, he will already have toppled one political giant. It wouldn’t be too farfetched to imagine he might have it in him to figure out how to upset a diminished Biden.
Moreover a campaign against DeSantis, who turns 45 in September, would magnify the age issue for Biden. Despite boasting a young party in terms of voters, Democrats have become a gerontocracy that can at best fight the Trump Republicans to something a little better than a draw. They have begun to correct this with the replacement of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the aging Democratic leadership team in the lower house of Congress. It is almost certainly too late to make this change with Biden at the presidential level. Democrats will have to hope Biden is up for one last campaign, perhaps against one of the two Republicans they most fear.
The Telegraph
