BIDEN vs. TRUMP
WHY ARE THE TWO PARTIES TRYING SO HARD TO STICK US WITH THIS CHOICE AGAIN?
Few Americans are demanding a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. In fact, most voters are appalled at the prospect. But it looks like that’s what they’ll get. So, why are the two parties so hellbent on serving up a dish for which the public has no appetite? And for the second time? That has a lot to do with how each party has evolved over the past decade — and the peculiar stalemate that has evolved between them.
Let’s start with the Republicans. It was Trump who first recognized back in 2016 that working-class voters were unhappy with Democratic and Republican elites. Cutting taxes and government was no longer enough to retain or expand the GOP advantage in key states. So, Trump took a step other Republicans were not willing to take: He broke with orthodox GOP economics on trade, entitlements and deficits, elevated the immigration issue above most others and put it all together in a populist package that made his opponents in the GOP primary look like the elites working-class voters despised.
In fall 2016, he ran the same playbook against Hillary Clinton, an almost perfect symbol of disdainful elitism, from her richly compensated Wall Street speeches to her characterization of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.” That strategy expanded Republicans’ working-class base and brought in many more white working-class voters, particularly in the Midwest, leading to Trump’s victory.
In 2020, Trump added more non-white workingclass voters to the GOP coalition, especially among Hispanics, but lost because of a shift of white college-educated voters toward the Democrats.
Three years later, Trump is viewed unfavorably by most voters, even as he is forced to defend himself in multiple criminal and civil cases. Voters find his character and honesty deficient; disapprove of his election denialism and scurrilous role on Jan. 6, 2021; and believe at least some of the many charges against him are valid. There is a very large contingent of voters, especially among the college-educated, who would not dream of voting for him under any circumstances.
But he has made a remarkable comeback, as working-class voters return to his column. Trump’s blustery blend of economic and cultural populism appeals to these voters in a way that his 2024 Republican opponents have not been able to replicate. He will likely ride these voters to the GOP nomination. That’s why, despite Trump’s overall unpopularity and legal troubles, Republicans are stuck with him.
How did the Democrats get stuck with Biden? In his 2020 campaign for the nomination, the longtime former senator had a better sense than other Democratic candidates of the normalcy that voters were looking for after more than six months of a pandemic,
accompanied by lockdowns and an economic crash. His rivals, in contrast, all believed their party had been radicalized by the Trump years, so they concentrated on trying to “out-left” each other.
A wide range of radical policy options were endorsed by many of these candidates: “Medicare-for-all” reforms that would eliminate private health insurance; a Green New Deal with an aggressive timeline for eliminating fossil fuels; banning fracking; decriminalizing illegal migration over the Southern U.S. border; providing health insurance to illegal immigrants; allowing prisoners to vote; abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; promising reparations to the descendants of enslaved people and the like.
Biden was able to take advantage of both the exhaustion with Trump’s chaotic presidency and his opponents’ radical ideas by striking a moderate note, promising to pursue progressive but sensible policies, provide the help Americans needed to get through the crisis and, above all, beat Trump. It is likely that Biden was the only candidate in 2020 with the stature and moderate profile needed to pull that off.
But there was a catch. After he clinched the nomination, he felt it was necessary to incorporate the views of the party’s left into his campaign’s policy stances and outlook. Usually, candidates try to move toward the center ahead of a general election campaign. But Biden did the reverse. He formed six “unity task forces” jointly coordinated by the Biden and Sanders campaign figures, covering climate change, criminal justice reform, the economy, education, health care and immigration.
The result was a blizzard of positions considerably to the left of the moderate politics upon which Biden had built his campaign. These positions found their way into the party platform, were incorporated into Biden’s campaign promises and, most importantly, determined how the Biden administration eventually made staffing and policy decisions once installed in office. This overlooked history — and the problems it created — are explained in greater detail in a book I recently co-wrote with John B. Judis, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.”
Now, with the next campaign about to begin, Biden and his party are struggling, despite a legislative record that most Democrats deem impressive. Biden is polling behind Trump nationally and in every swing state, with the possible exception of Wisconsin. Trump is preferred to Biden by wide margins on voters’ most important issue, the economy and inflation, as well as their second most important issue, immigration and border security and on crime and public safety. Biden’s approval rating at this point in his presidency is the lowest of any president going back to the 1940s, when the era of modern polling began.
It is tempting to ascribe the Democrats’ predicament to the age issue — Democrats would be in fine shape, the argument goes, if it weren’t for Biden’s age and concerns he is simply too old for a second term. But the party itself, not just Biden, is unpopular. Polling consistently indicates that voters are just as likely to view the Democratic Party as tolerant of extremists as they are the Republicans. Indeed, in a recent Morning Consult poll, voters said the Democratic Party was more ideologically extreme than the Republicans by 9 points.
What’s more, in any kind of intraparty scrum to replace Biden, it is unlikely, given the preferences of party activists, that Democrats would wind up presenting a more moderate face to voters. Quite the reverse. This helps explain why there has been so little internal pressure on Biden to step aside.
Biden, for all his flaws, represents a compromise between the activist left of the party and its moderate center. Biden’s three years in office have not resolved this tension. His presence provides a patina of working-class appeal, while accommodating the priorities and rhetoric of the party’s activist contingent and its constellation of supporting advocacy groups, foundations, think tanks, media outlets, influential intellectuals and big donors from Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood — what Judis and I term the “shadow party.” That awkward compromise keeps the Democratic Party together, but has put a ceiling on its support.
Thus, we are doomed to get Trump and Biden again. Perhaps the 2024 elections will resolve this stalemate and open a new era in which Americans can solve their problems. But I doubt it.