The overwhelming majority of American news media reports about the 2024 presidential race are missing the forest for the trees.
Over and over again, a dogma is put forward that the coming campaign will be a rematch between President Biden and Trump — never mind that 80% of the country doesn’t want it.
Over and over again, a dogma is put forward that seems unchallengeable in official Washington and green room redoubts, where no opinion expressed in private is ever said on camera. It’s a secret. The quiet part must never be spoken of out loud. The race will come down to four or five states, and be settled by less than 50,000 votes. This is repeated as gospel every day, all day, every week, and it isn’t even remotely an approximation of the reality that is unfolding.
The American political system is cracking up. The ice is cleaving from the glacier — literally — right now, and there is nothing anyone in Washington, DC, can do to stop it. Pretending otherwise is a form of nuttery that should not be appeased in this moment of crisis. Here is the current landscape:
In a recent Quinnipiac University national poll, Robert F Kennedy Jr. is getting 22% of the vote as a third-party candidate. According to the New York Times/Siena College surveys, Kennedy was in the high teens to upward of 25% in the six closest states that Biden won in 2020 over Trump: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan. Kennedy’s numbers are growing, not diminishing.
Independent Cornel West got 6% and 4% in the recent Quinnipiac and CNN/SSRS surveys. Should he maintain that level of support, it will destroy President Biden’s 2020 coalition and break the remnants of the Obama coalition.
Senator Joe Manchin has announced his retirement from the US Senate, but not public life. Governor Larry Hogan has called for President Biden to step down. The No Labels ticket is barely cloaked. The question of whether they will be on 50 state ballots will soon be at hand.
There are a smattering of other third-party candidates who are capable of achieving between one and 3% of the vote in a number of other states. These include Jill Stein, and a Libertarian Party candidate who has not yet been nominated, but is expected to be before the election.
Congresswoman Liz Cheney has made it known that she will give consideration to an independent candidacy in the months ahead, and hasn’t ruled out a challenge to Trump from his right flank.
Congressman Dean Phillips is challenging President Biden for the Democratic nomination because he believes that Joe Biden is almost certainly going to lose the election to Donald Trump (I do too).
What we are witnessing is the birth of parliamentary-style politics that will profoundly disrupt the two-party status quo. The first impact of the fractured race is that the competitive playing field will expand from five states to more than 35, at a low end. There will be real competition in states for the presidency that haven’t seen it in a generation.
The American system requires that the president secure 270 electoral votes, lest the matter be decided in the US House of Representatives that is currently presided over by a man who has no bank account, doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state, and believes people and dinosaurs cohabitated the Earth 6,000 years ago. Hours after the January 6 insurrection, he voted to strip the franchise from multitudes of millions of American voters, the majority of them Black and Brown. He continues to deny the results of the 2020 election. He is the second highest-ranking conspiracy theorist in the history of the US government falling perfectly in line behind Donald Trump, the man to whom he has vassalized himself. This is the man who is calling for political opponents to be locked up and for concentration camps to be built, while dehumanizing millions with the language of Hitler and Goebbels, but I digress too much. On January 6, 2025, Speaker Mike Johnson will have something to say, big time, if no one has 270 electoral votes. By the way, it won’t be a surprise. In fact, the theatrics around pretending it is will be brutally tedious by that point.
Let’s examine the analysis of one of the very best, most knowledgeable and deeply experienced political journalists covering American politics, Jonathan Martin of Politico. Below are some passages from his story, published yesterday:
2024 will be an extraordinary election, and it demands extraordinary measures.
That’s in part for reasons Biden refuses to accept: his capacity to do the job. The oldest president in history when he first took the oath, Biden will not be able to govern and campaign in the manner of previous incumbents. He simply does not have the capacity to do it, and his staff doesn’t trust him to even try, as they make clear by blocking him from the press. Biden’s bid will give new meaning to a Rose Garden campaign, and it requires accommodation to that unavoidable fact of life.
Moreover, and on this Biden would agree, this election will be exceptional because of the threat Trump poses. The former president is an exiled strongman who’s taken over a traditional political party and is attempting to reclaim office to consolidate power and punish his enemies with little regard for the Constitution. Just ask him.
With the increasingly likely possibility that this will be a multi-candidate election, and Biden at risk of being denied the nose-holding votes he needs from independents and pre-Trump Republicans, the president’s margin for error is nil.
There is something that must be addressed within the context of Martin’s factual assertions about the president. His capacity to campaign and facility with answering questions from the media in a dynamic environment requires him to fight back against Donald Trump and the extremist movement on a constant basis.
How will the president compete in a multi-candidate field in a 40-state national race besides smearing David Axelrod as “a prick” — or is that the strategy?
I’m going to say the quiet part out loud because it needs to be said, and I’m not afraid of social media mobs or cancel culture.
There are scores of quotes that have accumulated from White House officials over the last three years that have made clear that Trump wasn’t viewed as a threat, but rather a prop. Here are a few:
The legal tumult surrounding Mr. Trump is one reason Democrats feel bullish about facing him. Other reasons include that Mr. Biden has defeated Mr. Trump once before, and that the former president motivates Democratic voters to turn out. They also say that pairing 80-year-old Mr. Biden with 76-year-old Mr. Trump would minimize questions about Mr. Biden’s age and abilities—much more so than if he faced 44-year-old Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2023
But with Trump once more eyeing the White House, the conventional wisdom is again forming that he would be the easiest Republican to defeat, owing to the myriad of legal problems he’s facing.
“I’d say in a general election Trump may be the weakest of the major GOP contenders,” said Democratic strategist Mark Longabaugh. “And he likely will take on more water over time as several of the other legal cases play out.” Politico, April 4, 2023
There is little doubt that, despite what hypothetical general election polls right now might find, Democrats see Trump as the easier candidate to beat.
Trump has already lost to Biden once, his liabilities are widely known, and he has taken on a mountain of new political baggage with a federal indictment last week that charged him with mishandling sensitive national security records after he left office. Trump, who turns 77 Wednesday, would also have a tougher time than younger Republican rivals making a credible case that Biden, 80, is too old for the job. NBC News, June 13, 2023
The strategy was cynical, dangerous and profoundly misguided. There are multitudes of stories accumulating across the political press that report on President Biden’s frustrations for not being appropriately thanked by the American people for his many accomplishments. Apparently, they are building and the kindling behind comments from White House advisors and campaign staff that once the American people are focused on the accomplishments, then the polls will flip around and President Biden will be back on top.
The only problem with this approach is that it precludes a discussion of what comes next. Elections are about the future, never the past. The brutal truth is that voters don’t throw parades for political leaders for doing what they said they would do. They simply don’t. Perhaps someone on the White House staff should brief the president on how the British public thanked Winston Churchill for his role in winning World War II. Life isn’t fair at the top, as they used to say, but today there seems to be a despair from the top about this immutable rule of American cultural physics.
Personally, I feel like it is a great contributor to a stirring anger, distrust and bitterness between the American people and the power classes they revile. It leaves people susceptible to the siren song of fascism, extremism, violence, and ultimately, death. It opens the door for this:
Speaking the quiet part out loud isn’t popular in the “angry 20’s,” where fear of the mob constrains the truth, and turns it into a whisper. The whisper is fear-driven, and a mark of public cowardice and cynicism.
What is coming is not what is being reported. What is being reported is a slice of reality wrapped in a myriad of agendas. This much is clear though: Democratic voters will decide the Democratic nomination and angry members of Congress and the DNC can huff, puff and bluster all day long, but it doesn’t change something elemental: in order for democracy to be preserved, it must be practiced.
Steve, you are unfortunately missing the “forest from the trees,” as you put it. The upcoming election isn’t “Biden vs Trump,” as you do get right. It is Democrats vs Republicans - that is forest. It is Anthony Blinken vs Michael Flynn, Adam Schiff vs Mike Johnson, Jack Smith vs Louie Gohmert. Biden is simply head of a very large cadre of mostly competent, honest, democrats with a small d. Trump is head of a competing cadre of incompetent, venal, dishonest, often theocratic and racist cultists.
Stop focusing on just to top of the ticket. Talk about the real forest.
Biden can win if Democrats run a strong campaign on issues like abortion that drive people to the polls. So far, Biden has shown no signs of incompetence and he has a strong staff. This is not the best of all possible worlds but we are fighting for our democracy.