The unavoidable question: Who’s the weakest candidate?
One of them looks old, the other looks older. One of them faced a nomination challenge from one of his presidential appointees, the other faces continual calls to step away from the campaign. One of them sees a dystopian future, the other seems stuck in a romantic past.
Ordinarily presidential candidates on the precipice of clinching their party’s nomination seem to move from strength to strength. This time President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump seem to be moving from weakness to weakness.
All of which prompts the following unusual but unavoidable question: Which of the two presumptive presidential candidates is weakest?
Which is weakest?
Like everything else in the 2024 presidential campaign, it’s a close call.
Mr. Biden is limping toward the finish line, beset by questions about why he hasn’t stepped aside for a new generation of leadership — the very call he made in 1970 when, at age 29, he deftly played the age card in his challenge to an established incumbent, Republican Senator Caleb Boggs, who was 20 years younger than Mr. Biden is now. “To Cale Boggs, an unfair tax was the 1948 poll tax,” read a Biden newspaper ad. “To Joe Biden, an unfair tax is the 1972 income tax.”
The tagline, which no one but White House loyalists would apply to the Biden 2024 campaign: “Joe Biden. He understands what’s happening today.”
Mr. Trump may have surged Tuesday by winning every state but tiny Vermont, which in any case isn’t going to fall into the Republican column in November, but the large numbers of voters who chose former Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina is a warning sign that, for all his talk about GOP unity, the party is far from unified.
These two candidates are running against themselves as much as against each other. It isn’t a question of who wins in the general election so much as a question of who loses. It’s hard to decide which of the candidates has a bigger problem.
Mr. Biden’s is the very record — on the economy, on immigration, on the Middle East — that his aides believe is his biggest asset.
Look no farther than the recent results in Minnesota. In a state with a vigorous Democratic tradition, one-fifth of those who voted in the primary chose “unc o m m i t t e d ” over Mr. Biden. The warning signs, which were present also in North Carolina (a potential swing state) and Massachusetts, came only a week after a similar showing in Michigan, a vital swing state with a large ArabAmerican population.
The candidates’ troubles
In each place the qualms with Mr. Biden (or the bitter disappointment), were obvious and ominous: The defection came among the young and the progressive, adding their doubts to those of the substantial Muslim opposition to the Biden response to the war in Gaza.
Not that Mr. Biden is the only candidate with troubles. Except in the dark red enclaves of the South, Ms. Haley racked up substantial numbers — not nearly enough to deny huge troves of delegates to Mr. Trump but enough to display deep doubts about him, his temperament, and his prospects in coming legal cases. Indeed, there are credible indications in exit polls that Republican support for Mr. Trump could leach away if he is actually convicted in a criminal case.
But the Biden team shouldn’t breath easy, or count on the courts.
The rate of 2020 Trump voters who told the New York Times/Siena poll they would stick with their man four years later was nearly unanimous (97%). Not so for 2020 Biden voters (83%), with one in ten actually saying they will choose Mr. Trump this time around.
Early polls are unreliable, to be sure. But, still, they reliably identify vulnerabilities, and the survey finding that the percentage of young voters who will stick with Mr. Biden has dropped by half is a bugle blast of crisis for the Democrats. There are similar warning signs in the suburbs, which propelled Mr. Biden to victory in 2020 and boosted Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterm congressional elections.
Four years ago, Mr. Biden won the suburbs by 11 percentage points. His margin now is a paltry two points, within the margin of error. And his margin among Blacks, regarded as the most reliable of Democratic constituencies, has dropped by almost half. It was Black votes in 2020 that helped seal his nomination.
Perhaps the most dangerous finding for the Biden team came in a Wall Street Journal poll showing that twice as many voters thought the Trump policies during his presidency benefited them than the rate who felt that Mr. Biden’s policies aided them.
Then again, look to that Minnesota primary on Super Tuesday. Four-fifths of the Haley voters said they wouldn’t support Mr. Trump in November. That pretty much puts Minnesota’s ten electoral votes out of Mr. Trump’s reach, no matter how let down young and Moslem voters feel toward Mr. Biden. The same phenomenon showed up in other states.
Ms. Haley may have been vanquished on Super Tuesday, but she is unbowed. In her news conference suspending her campaign she didn’t endorse Mr. Trump. Note that she suspended her effort rather than withdrew. That means that she retains her delegates, which positions her to be the leading alternative candidate if Mr. Trump suffers a health episode or if a legal conviction puts him in jeopardy.
Slender reeds
A stroke or a credible crime accusation is a slender reed on which to base presidential hopes. But those are also the very factors that could endanger Mr. Biden, whose son Hunter is no asset to the President.
No one will win this presidential race. Someone will lose it. Already the public has.