Trump is right where Biden wants him
Yep. President Biden has Donald Trump right where he wants him. Cruising into New Hampshire, with a measly 51 percent of the vote out of the Iowa caucuses.
Or, as Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Biden reelection campaign adviser, told MSNBC on the night of Trump’s big triumph, “Almost half of the base of the Republican Party showing up for this caucus tonight voted against Donald Trump. Think about that.” According to Pritzker, that “tells you the weakness of Donald Trump.”
Desperate Democratic spin, you scoff ? It’s spin, for sure. But as analysts like Taegan Goddard pointed out, there are things for Biden to like about the Iowa results. About 110,000 Iowans participated in the caucuses — down from 186,000 in 2016. Frigid weather could be a factor, “but for a candidate based on cult-like loyalty, the turnout was very disappointing,” Goddard wrote in his Political Wire. Fifty-one percent of 110,000 also adds up to a mere 56,100 Iowans backing Trump and those 56,100 Iowans are whiter, more religious, and more politically conservative than the rest of America. According to exit polls, 31 percent of Iowa caucusgoers — who, remember, are all hard-core Republicans — said Trump would be unfit for office if he is convicted, which explains why Trump is fighting so hard to make the case that as a former president, he has immunity and can’t be criminally charged.
Still, Iowa gave Trump the “landslide” headlines and air of inevitability that he craves. What happens next in New Hampshire is likely to cement it.
With her third-place finish in Iowa, Nikki Haley lost any serious chance of framing the Republican contest as a two-person race. And she has not impressed voters on her return to the Granite State. In a Fox News interview, Haley insisted America “has never been a racist country,” seeming to forget the racism she previously said she encountered while growing up in South Carolina as the child of emigrant Sikh parents from India. In a CNN interview, Haley also ducked a question about the writer E. Jean Carroll’s case against Trump, saying she hasn’t looked at it. Last year, Carroll was awarded $5 million after a jury found that Trump had sexually abused her; a damages trial that Carroll brought against Trump for defamation in the aftermath of that verdict is currently underway in New York.
Those timid answers, plus Haley’s decision to duck a pre-primary debate unless Trump participated, which prompted its cancellation, are a good way to quickly turn off the independent voters she needs for a strong showing in New Hampshire. The latest Boston Globe/Suffolk/NBC10 poll shows Trump leading Haley by 16 points — in other words, Haley is not gaining any ground.
A Trump win in New Hampshire seals the nomination for him and with that seals the contours of the 2024 election. The cult of Trump has passionate followers and equally passionate enemies. Voters in the middle may just be tired enough of the chaos that Haley mentions but hasn’t been willing to divorce herself from as a candidate. Never Trumpers, plus those voters just tired of thinking about all the Trump-associated chaos, can make up the Biden coalition that Haley is afraid to court with abandon.
Trump has been criminally charged in four cases and faces 91 indictments. When it comes to other baggage, voters may prefer to think of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol as an unpleasant memory. But the threat Trump poses to democracy is a clear and present danger, as Trump himself reminds people. Goddard also pointed out in his Political Wire that Trump used the phrase “four years and beyond” in Iowa to describe his next stay in the White House, despite the fact that under the Constitution a president can serve only two four-year terms.
The New Hampshire results will reveal even more of Trump’s strengths and weaknesses as a candidate in 2024. Meanwhile, while Biden’s name is not on the ballot, a write-in campaign is still somewhat surreptitiously underway, against the wishes of the Democratic National Committee. The goal, said Aaron Jacobs, a spokesperson for “Write In Joe Biden,” is to make sure Biden gets more votes than any of the 21 other candidates listed on the Democratic presidential ballot. Since Biden’s name is not among those listed candidates, a voter would have to write in Biden’s name at the end of the list and fill in the bubble next to it. “We’re certainly making the case coming out of Iowa that there is really only one person who can stop Donald Trump and that’s Joe Biden,” Jacobs told me. “No one on the Republican side can stop him. "
Yep, after Iowa, Biden versus Trump is the race that Biden wants because he thinks he can win it.
Just like Ted Lasso, Biden has to “believe.”
Never Trumpers, plus those voters just tired of thinking about all the Trump-associated chaos, can make up the Biden coalition that Haley is afraid to court with abandon.