WILL IT MATTER ON MARCH 5?
By the time Tennessee’s presidential primary six weeks from today gets here, the combatants in the 2024 race may be a foregone conclusion.
Yep, those two, Trump and Biden, the same choice as in 2020. Today, voters in New Hampshire — the fifth smallest state by size and the 10th least populous — have a chance to change the trajectory in the race for the Republican nominee by giving former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley a majority over Trump with their vote. Polls say it’s not likely to happen.
In our convoluted presidential primary system, the Granite State is likely to be the last place she could be a stopper. She might do well in some states down the line, but the former president is likely to swamp her in delegates by the time anything good happens for her, if it does.
Tennesseans — those who adore Trump and those who don’t — have no say in New Hampshire. We can only watch and read to see what happens there.
Recent public opinion polls have said a majority of Americans don’t want 2024 to be a rematch of 2020. They said they don’t want either candidate. Yet upwards of 70% of voters in the individual parties have favorable views of the leading candidate in their party.
That’s why we’re likely to get Trump-Biden again. America arguably is in the longest run of flawed men it has elected president since the mid-1800s. Some would say it stretches to three presidents, some to four, some to five.
The problem is we’ve done it to ourselves by not demanding better.
When Trump declared his candidacy for president in 2015, his bid was not taken seriously at first. He was a rich guy, all right. He had some successes in real estate development (and some failures not a lot of people knew about). He’d been on TV with a popular reality show, so he had name recognition. And he was not afraid to say controversial things.
That latter attribute — if you could call it that — made him popular with the national media, so they promoted him and promoted him. Until, that is, the electorate began giving him a lot of votes.
What Trump didn’t know about the issues was a lot, but inflammatory rhetoric seemed to be more important than policy smarts when it came to votes. One by one, he eliminated nearly 20 other Republican candidates until he was the last one standing. His subsequent Electoral College victory in the general election over another flawed candidate, one not liked by a significant portion of the electorate, put him in the White House.
When Biden declared his candidacy for president in 2020, his bid was not taken seriously at first, either. Most of his Democratic opponents were younger, more glib and didn’t suffer from being a part of a previous administration. On the heels of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ win in the New Hampshire primary, U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-South Carolina, knew Sanders could never be the Democratic nominee and win a general election, so he bet the farm on the middling Biden and told his constituents this was the guy to support.
The longtime Delaware politico, who at least had name recognition from a lifetime in the Senate, two previous presidential runs and two terms as Barack Obama’s vice president, went on to win the Palmetto State and the Democratic nomination.
With a pandemic raging, Trump befuddled about how to handle it and the help of the anti-Trump national media, Biden was the perfect foil. He could campaign from his basement by promising anything to anyone while Trump was on the front lines dealing with COVID and its economic repercussions. Voters who in February 2020 almost assuredly would have given Trump a second term instead elected Biden.
Four years later, the two candidates have even less to offer. Trump is facing scores of charges in four different pending trials, while the enfeebled Biden enacted policies that awakened inflation, made the country energy dependent and directed strategies that made the country weaker in foreign policy.
Today, the electorate is in a fix. No top Democratic name will challenge Biden because he’s a sitting president and doing so never turns out well (see Kennedy, Ted). Most of the handful who took on Trump — including the once formidable Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — already have fallen by the wayside. That leaves Haley to carry the water of all those who want someone other than Trump.
By the time this day is over, we may know just how big that group is and whether anyone will give a hoot for whom Tennesseans cast their ballot on March 5.