How did the country end up with a choice that most of its voters don’t want?
Well, here it is.
With Donald Trump’s victory in tonight’s New Hampshire primary, the die is cast. Or rather, the public can no longer ignore that the die is cast. Really, it was cast months, even years, ago and it has landed on what most Americans consider a bad roll: a rematch of the 2020 election between Trump and President Joe Biden.
Dread of this outcome is perhaps the most unifying issue in an otherwise polarized political moment. For years, Americans have been telling pollsters—and reporters and friends and family and neighbors—that they don’t want to see the two men running for president in 2024.
Polls have shown that Democratic voters have wanted an alternative to Biden since well before the 2022 midterm elections (elections in which, it’s worth noting, his party outperformed expectations and historical norms). Many of those voters cite his advanced age—he’ll turn 82 shortly after the election in November. Despite this, a long roster of rising Democrats has declined to run against the sitting president, ceding the challenge to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a conspiratorial loon who realized how little Democrats wanted him and switched to an independent bid, and Representative Dean Phillips, who managed to be even less attractive to voters than Biden, even though the president wasn’t on the ballot in New Hampshire. (Thanks to a write-in campaign, Biden still easily won.)
Read: Can Biden win a primary he ignored?
A look at the Republican side shows why high-profile Democrats may have been wary of jumping in. Even though Donald Trump has twice lost the national popular vote, twice been impeached, and become embroiled in legal battles across the country, he has easily chewed through a field boasting some otherwise credible candidates. The primary may even have permanently suffocated the national ambitions of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once seen as the future of the GOP. Though anti-Trump Republicans pleaded for a one-on-one matchup between Trump and some alternative, he solidly beat Nikki Haley when it finally happened. The simple fact is that Trump remains very popular with the Republican base. (Even so, the early contests have revealed some of his weaknesses, as my colleague Ron Brownstein details.)
Voters are so disgusted by the prospect of a Trump-Biden race that many of them simply refuse to believe it will happen. Trump has led practically every major national poll for years and every early-state poll for months; he won twice as much support in the Iowa caucuses as any challenger; and yet, in a recent Economist/YouGov poll, only 45 percent of Democrats said they believed that he’d be the Republican nominee. A quarter expect, or claim to expect, someone else to get the bid. Only about half of independents in the same poll anticipated a Trump nomination. The Biden campaign says its polling shows that a full three-quarters of undecided voters don’t believe that Trump will be the nominee.
How did the country end up with a choice that so many of its voters don’t want? The most fundamental reason is polarization, and in particular negative polarization—dislike and contempt for the opposite party. In office, Trump and Biden have been among the most unpopular executives in American history, and politics scholars believe that this might be a lasting dynamic: No president may be able to gain a durable majority of popular support, but thanks to committed cores of supporters, no president may see the dramatic collapses that Richard Nixon and George W. Bush did, either.
At one time, both parties had liberal, moderate, and conservative wings. The result was that when the parties nominated candidates who had broad appeal within the party, those candidates also tended to have broad appeal outside the party. That does not describe this year’s Republican primary. The party’s base has opted to return to a candidate who comfortably lost the most recent election. Democrats, meanwhile, are sticking with a president who’s had consistently low approval ratings. As the legal scholar Edward Foley writes, Haley is likely the choice of more voters at this moment than either Biden or Trump, but the two-party system, under conditions of intense partisanship, makes her campaign essentially finished after her New Hampshire defeat.
“As the parties have polarized and separated, what’s happened is that while the parties remain internally fractious, what unites them more than ever is hatred of the other party,” the political scientist Lee Drutman told me last year.
Read: First in the nation—and last?
Polarization’s effects have been visible throughout the primaries. Historically, one would have expected that Trump’s 91 felony indictments would have hurt his campaign, but instead—as DeSantis supporters lamented—they only helped rally Republicans to him. Biden, meanwhile, has benefited from Democrats concluding that he may be the best candidate to beat Trump once again, despite their misgivings about him. (Biden advisers believe that once voters are forced to recognize that the GOP nominee is Trump, the president’s support will firm up.)
The fact that a Biden-Trump rematch is now effectively assured does not guarantee that the two men will top their party’s tickets in November. Although Trump has given every indication that he will place his legal struggles at the center of his campaign, no precedent predicts how criminal trials or a possible conviction would affect his campaign. Biden and Trump are both at ages when health is unpredictable and can change quickly, though both men’s doctors say they are in good shape.
But the important thing is that these are asterisks. Voters have prayed, and sometimes believed, that some outside force would rescue them from the inevitable. Tonight’s primary results should provide a wake-up as bracing as the New Hampshire winter.
Nothing Can Stop a Biden-Trump Rematch
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24.01.2024
How did the country end up with a choice that most of its voters don’t want?
Well, here it is.
With Donald Trump’s victory in tonight’s New Hampshire primary, the die is cast. Or rather, the public can no longer ignore that the die is cast. Really, it was cast months, even years, ago and it has landed on what most Americans consider a bad roll: a rematch of the 2020 election between Trump and President Joe Biden.
Dread of this outcome is perhaps the most unifying issue in an otherwise polarized political moment. For years, Americans have been telling pollsters—and reporters and friends and family and neighbors—that they don’t want to see the two men running for president in 2024.
Polls have shown that Democratic voters have wanted an alternative to Biden since well before the 2022 midterm elections (elections in which, it’s worth noting, his party outperformed expectations and historical norms). Many of those voters cite his advanced age—he’ll turn 82 shortly after the election in November. Despite this, a long roster of rising Democrats has declined to run against the sitting president, ceding the challenge to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a conspiratorial loon who realized how little Democrats wanted him and switched to an independent bid, and Representative Dean Phillips, who managed to be even less attractive to voters than Biden, even though the president wasn’t on the ballot in New Hampshire. (Thanks to a write-in campaign, Biden still........
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