Biden versus Trump: The rematch Americans don’t want
A Joe Biden-Donald Trump rematch seemed highly implausible after the 2020 election. But that’s what is set to happen this year, despite the glaring flaws of both candidates.
The election most Americans don’t want is the one they are going to get this November.
Joe Biden, the oldest president in history and one of the most unpopular in recent times, is determined to seek a second term. So is Donald Trump, the former president who tried unsuccessfully to overturn his 2020 defeat and now wants a rematch – and retribution.
Poll after poll shows voters would prefer a contest between someone younger and someone not facing the very real prospect of jail time.
But no serious challenger has emerged to Biden, the incumbent Democrat. And Trump’s dominant win in this week’s Iowa caucuses, the first round of the Republican nominating process, confirms his stranglehold on the party loyalists who are choosing their candidate.
Trump’s margin of victory in Iowa was the biggest for a contested Republican caucus in history. If he wins again next Tuesday (local time) in New Hampshire – a double that has not been completed by anyone but a sitting president – then the race will be all but over.
The notion of a Biden-Trump election in 2024 seemed highly implausible after 2020. The Republican left the White House in disgrace, having refused to accept his defeat which sparked the deadly Capitol riot and resulted in his second impeachment, and ultimately federal and state criminal charges. His political career appeared dead and buried.
As for Biden, he had suggested the 2020 election could also be his last, having described himself as a “bridge” to a new generation of Democratic leaders amid fears about his age.
“I view myself as a transition candidate,” he said during the campaign.
Nevertheless, in April last year, the President confirmed he would seek a second term, five months after his Republican rival unveiled his own re-election bid.
Trump’s announcement had come at another moment of weakness, a week after the 2022 midterm elections in which his hand-picked candidates were steamrolled, costing the party control of Congress. Compounding his vulnerability was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s landslide victory in the one-time swing state, stamping him as a presidential contender.
Since that point, however, the Republican race has been one-way traffic for Trump. The four sets of criminal charges laid against him last year – the first against a US president – only increased his lead, as voters were swayed by his claims of a deep state election interference plot and other candidates parroted the same script instead of confronting their rival.
DeSantis, who styles himself as a drama-free successor to Trump, followed a tried-and-true path in Iowa by visiting all 99 counties and securing the Republican governor’s endorsement. He regularly promised to win until it became clear that even finishing second would be difficult, amid a wave of momentum for Trump’s United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley.
In the end, Trump received 51 per cent of the vote, with 21 per cent for DeSantis and 19 per cent for Haley. The meaning of those numbers is very much in the eye of the beholder.
Trump’s supporters believe the scale of his Iowa win essentially ends the race, hence his uncharacteristically sunny victory speech in which he did not even bother attacking his rivals. His critics, on the other hand, point out that half the Iowans who came out to caucus during a brutal snowstorm did so to support anyone but Trump.
DeSantis celebrated second place because it meant “we got our ticket punched out of Iowa”,
“They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us,” he told supporters, ignoring the fact that he had somehow expected to win without ever forcefully opposing the frontrunner.
Haley, for her part, said Iowa “made this Republican primary a two-person race”, given her relative advantage over DeSantis among the more moderate New Hampshire voters. That said, even a win on Tuesday is unlikely to improve her chances of beating Trump in the predominantly conservative states to come.
DeSantis has already shifted his attention to the primary in South Carolina – where Haley was once the governor – on February 24. Trump adviser Chris LaCivita similarly told the New York Times: “South Carolina is where Nikki Haley’s dreams go to die.”
As long as both Haley and DeSantis stay alive, they will keep splitting the non-Trump vote in a way that only favours the former president, even as he spends more time in courtrooms than on the campaign trail.
While Iowa may have surprised those still labouring under the misapprehension that Trump is unelectable, Biden and his team are already preparing to face him in November.
The President kicked off 2024 with his most forceful denunciation yet of his predecessor, branding him a threat to democracy three years after he sparked the January 6 insurrection.
However, Biden trails Trump in head-to-head polls and is struggling to lift his dire approval rating, prompting some Democrats to sound the alarm. Among the most vocal is David Axelrod, former president Barack Obama’s key strategist, who has repeatedly questioned Biden’s anti-Trump strategy given most Americans are preoccupied by a cost of living crisis.
In private, Biden has vented that Axelrod is a “prick”. But Obama himself has also warned him about Trump’s political strength and the weaknesses of his campaign, according to the Washington Post, which reported that he has been animated during their lunches.
Even so, virtually no one in the Democratic Party is willing to call for the President to drop out. California Governor Gavin Newsom, considered among the most likely replacement candidates, remains a firm Biden backer while also running what has amounted to a shadow campaign including an unusual debate against DeSantis.
Biden’s only opponents for the Democratic nomination are self-help author Marianne Williamson and Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips. This Tuesday, one of them is likely to win an unsanctioned New Hampshire primary – the President will not be on the ballot after he sought to hand its first-in-the-nation status to the more diverse state of South Carolina.
Phillips knows he has almost no chance of winning the nomination, although he says his candidacy is more about forcing Democrats to realise Biden “is destined to lose to the most dangerous man in American history”.
“His numbers are horrible. He’s 81 years old. His time has passed, and he should have passed the torch,” he told Vox.
Originally published as Biden versus Trump: The rematch Americans don’t want
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