Trump-Biden rematch remains Joe Biden’s best bet for staying in office
Donald Trump wasn’t the only one beaming following his historic Iowa caucus history. The incumbent President would have been popping the champagne corks, too.
Donald Trump wasn’t the only one beaming on Monday night, wallowing in the biggest victory margin in Iowa caucus history.
Joe Biden would have been popping the champagne corks, too. A Trump-Biden rematch remains the incumbent President’s best bet for staying in office, albeit an increasingly poor bet if the former president’s growing support continues to defy traditional political calculus that might have marked down a candidate facing 91 felony charges.
Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s former White House communications director, straight up told CNN the White House was celebrating Trump’s victory.
“The sooner people recognise Donald Trump is the nominee, the better it is for Joe Biden,” she said. I don’t doubt she means it.
For all the former president’s obvious and resurgent popularity among Republicans, his victory in November is far from certain given the ignominy of his previous departure.
If Trump had gone quietly in 2020 he’d be a shoo-in to win this year, but he didn’t. He disgraced himself in the eyes of most American voters, whatever the ultimate legality of his behaviour.
Biden is probably the weakest US presidential candidate ever, in rapid decline and presiding over domestic and foreign policy disasters.
After years of rampant inflation, unprecedented illegal immigration, and the emergence of at least three wars in Europe and the Middle East with the potential to escalate, the incumbent President and his hangers-on don’t want to talk about their record. They want to talk about Trump’s existential threat to democracy, however exaggerated.
It seemed to work in the 2022 midterm elections, where candidates endorsed by Trump performed badly in the wake of the regular presidential warnings.
“Here’s the thing: this election was always going to be you and me versus extreme MAGA Republicans. It was true yesterday and it’ll be true tomorrow,” Biden (or more accurately his staff) said on social media after the results came in.
Jeff Anderson, a former Trump administration senior official and the founder of The American Main Street Initiative, says the effect of what he calls “clearly politically motivated” indictments has been to boost Trump’s support, deliberately or otherwise.
“The Democrats have succeeded so far, or Biden has, in sort of picking the Republican nominee; it’s a strange thing to have the other side do that, but that’s kind of been the effect here,” he told me ahead of the Iowa caucuses.
To be sure, Trump outperformed among the 120,000 or so people who make up the dedicated sliver of Iowan Republicans willing to brave Arctic conditions on Monday night. But turnout was down by one-third and the bigger picture is more ambiguous.
Pollsters did a good job of picking the outcome in Iowa, forecasting a “Trumpslide” for weeks, but that same methodology gives Trump only a slight edge in a decreasingly hypothetical match-up with Biden, within the margin of error.
The most recent YouGov poll put Trump’s support at 50 per cent compared with Biden’s 48 per cent. But that’s before the full symphony of Democrat fearmongering strikes up after Trump’s likely Republican coronation at the party’s July national convention.
The American electorate is divided roughly into thirds: Democrats, independents and Republicans. It’s unlikely the former president gets any votes from the first group, given the intense polarisation and tribalism surrounding perceptions of Trump’s behaviour in office and especially his alleged criminality.
Independents, who don’t have the same disdain for the mainstream media or judicial system as most Republicans, will prove decisive. A conviction for Trump therefore could be politically lethal, even for something silly and academic as petulantly keeping classified documents at Mar-A-Lago, which legal analysts consider almost a open-and-shut case if it gets to trial.
Republican trust in the US mainstream media – understandably, after years of obvious and relentless bias against Republicans and Trump in particular – has hit rock bottom: 11 per cent according to an October 2023 Gallup poll, down from 52 per cent in 1998.
Almost 30 per cent of independents, however, still had confidence, it found – a big enough share to potentially sway their vote amid a forthcoming 24/7 cacophony of warnings about a second Trump presidency.
As for Republicans, where will Nikki Haley’s 20 per cent or so support go? If not mainly to Trump, his campaign should be worried.
Andy Sabin, a big Haley campaign donor, revealed on Fox News on Monday that a number of Haley’s biggest contributions were coming from Democrats, and a big fundraiser slated for New York City on January 30 was being hosted by a big Democrat donor whose name he wouldn’t reveal.
Robert F. Kennedy’s candidacy, if he makes it on to enough state ballots by November – no small task given the two major parties make it extremely difficult for outsiders – throws another wild card into the mix.
Kennedy’s policy platform harks back to the Democrats of the 1960s – pro-free speech and abortion, scepticism of big corporations and the security state – and Republicans and Democrats are bickering over who the independent will damage the most.
He’s polling about 15 per cent nationally, putting him in striking distance of besting Ross Perot’s nearly 19 per cent vote haul from 1992 – a record for an independent – who famously handed the presidency to Bill Clinton.
Iowa has paved the way for a near certain Trump Republican nomination. It’s significant that Vivek Ramaswamy, the dynamic 38-year-old entrepreneur who achieved a respectable 8 per cent in the vote, didn’t simply retire from the race.
He immediately flew to New Hampshire to start campaigning for Trump. Ramaswamy’s remarkable rhetorical ability, not to mention his support base, will bolster Trump’s campaign.
The November election is still too far away to start predicting, but many Democrats will be rooting for Trump too until then.
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