Biden-Trump: A familiar bout in an unprecedented election
The oldest-ever president and his only slightly younger predecessor are marching toward a rematch
With the last embers of the Republican primary extinguished after Super Tuesday, the country is lurching into a new phase in the 2024 presidential election: a one-onone matchup between President Biden and former President Donald Trump that is unlike any other contest in modern history.
The fate of the last Republican challenger, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, was uncertain Tuesday night as Trump trounced her in states across the country. The former president is on track to clinch the GOP nomination as soon as next week, while Biden is sailing toward the Democratic nomination again.
Never has America had to choose between two candidates so old, and never in modern times has the choice been between two so strongly disliked hopefuls who both are essentially running as incumbents, already having established White House track records. Never has a campaign played out in split-screen fashion on the trail and in the courtroom, with a set of criminal cases that could land one of the candidates, Trump, in jail and facing adverse civil judgments that could cripple his family business.
Biden, meanwhile, faces deep skepticism about his age and fitness to continue serving and will need to overcome dismal approval ratings to win a second term.
The candidates will make their pitch to an electorate that is more polarized and fractured than ever in modern politics. Traditional media gatekeepers have less influence than in the past, with a public that is consuming news from an ever-expanding set of outlets with a more diffuse set of standards and norms dictating coverage.
Tentpole events are less sturdy: National party conventions have attracted less attention from voters and television networks, and it is unclear if there will be the typical cadence of three pre-election presidential debates and a vice presidential exchange.
Should they occur, the debates will be scrutinized less for the agenda each candidate would bring to the White House than for whether verbal slips and tortured locution, already a feature of their public appearances, are indications of cognitive decline tied to their advanced ages.
Beyond framing the election as a choice between competing visions for the country, both candidates will have unique challenges in persuading Americans that they are capable of doing the job.
Biden will have to convince large shares of Americans that he has the mental acuity to handle a position considered the most difficult in the world, as nearly threequarters of voters say he’s too old to run again, Wall
Street Journal polling finds. Trump will have to persuade the country that his stream of criminal charges and adverse civil judgments won’t follow him into the White House and hamper his effectiveness, as Journal polling shows that a conviction would hurt his political standing.
“If you’re ever going to use the word ‘unprecedented’—this is the cycle,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings and a member of the Democratic National Committee.
Kamarck pointed to Trump’s unique baggage, noting that traditionally a candidate weighed down with so much controversy wouldn’t clear a presidential nomination process.
But how to run against someone who successfully operates so outside American norms? “I don’t quite know,” Kamarck said. “I don’t think the Biden campaign does either.”
Trump stands as a unique figure in American politics—less the leader of a political party united by a consistent governing philosophy than as the commander of a movement built around his personality, his eagerness to challenge norms and his iconoclastic policy preferences. He has changed almost every expectation of how campaigns are run, including by finding ways to communicate directly with his supporters through his own social-media platform. In one break from tradition, Trump has spent more time lately cementing the loyalty of his supporters—and demonizing opponents even within his own party—than making the moves a candidate would normally make at this point to try to unify his party and draw in the voters who had backed other candidates in the primaries.
He has warned donors to Haley that they will be banished from the party. “We’re getting rid of the Romneys of the world,” he said this week, referring to retiring Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, a fellow Republican and former party standard-bearer. “This is the age of Trump, and we don’t know a lot about this age,” said Doug Sosnik, a White House aide during President Bill Clinton’s term. “He’s the single most dominant figure in American politics, and everything revolves around him.”
Both candidates arrive at the moment with a deep understanding of what a national campaign typically entails. For Trump, it will be his third time on the presidential ballot in November. For Biden, it will be his fifth campaign as a candidate for president or vice president.
Because the two candidates are both universally known and already have records as president, “there is very little that you are going to tell a voter in the future, over the next six months, that they don’t already know or suspect about Joe Biden and Donald Trump,” said pollster Tony Fabrizio, who works for a super PAC backing Trump.
That suggests the campaign could be influenced as much by external events as by the candidates’ images or policies. “Right now, we’re focused on immigration and the economy,” two issues on which voters give Biden low marks, said Fabrizio, who also helps conduct Wall Street Journal polls. “If the focus shifts onto issues that Biden tends to do better on…that would give Biden an advantage.’’
Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota and a onetime Republican presidential contender, said that given the contest is shaping up to be a “rerun campaign” between two wellknown figures, it will be important to focus on dynamics that have changed since 2020.
Democrats point to shifts from when voters last chose between Trump and Biden in 2020: the increased importance of abortion as an issue in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. “The refusal to accept defeat and the effort to encourage violence to overturn an election was shocking even for Donald Trump,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.), who was Hillary Clinton’s 2020 running mate.
Biden will frame his case on Thursday night when he delivers the State of the Union address. The speech is expected to draw one of his biggest audiences of the year, rivaling only the address he’s set to give in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention in August. This year’s unusual contest comes amid a string of norm-busting presidential elections.
The election of 2020 was marked by the Covid pandemic forcing the candidates to curtail their public appearances and leaving campaigns scrambling to reach voters at a time of stay-athome isolation.
And four years before that, Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton were broadly disliked at about this point in 2016, when they were on the cusp of securing their parties’ nominations. At the time, that marked a low point in recent American history for having two widely panned choices. But the intensity of distaste for the two expected nominees is even stronger today. While 41% of voters held a “very negative” view of Clinton and 44% of Trump, Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling in May of that year found, “very unfavorable” views of Biden and Trump stand at about 50% today, Journal polling finds.
At the same time, Trump’s loyal base of support means a larger share of voters hold a favorable view of him, meaning that his image, overall, is stronger than in 2016.
Mike Bocian, a Democratic pollster who also works on Journal surveys, said that history is little guide on how to read 2024 poll numbers for clues to how the election will unfold. “It’s like, throw it all out. We’ve never had two incumbents running against each other before and that’s basically what we have right now.”
Both candidates will have unique challenges in persuading Americans that they are capable of doing the job