For months, headlines have told us that most Americans don’t want the 2024 presidential campaign to be a rematch of Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. And yet both candidates are lapping their respective fields in primary polling.
Even in New Hampshire, where the Republican primary electorate has a moderate streak, the recent bump in former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s poll numbers has not been met with a decline in Trump’s support. On the Democratic side, Representative Dean Phillips has hinged his strategy on a big showing in the Granite State, which is holding its primary without sanction from the Democratic National Committee and where Biden isn’t on the ballot. Yet all indications are Phillips, gasping for media oxygen, will get swamped by a write-in effort for the incumbent.
Less than three weeks from now, after Iowa’s January 15 caucuses and New Hampshire’s January 23 primary, don’t be surprised if all significant challengers to Trump and Biden throw in the towel.
Why is this happening? Maybe it’s because Biden and Trump really are the candidates we’ve wanted all along.
Much poll data in the past year has suggested majorities of voters did not want Biden and Trump to run again, were not enthusiastic about their campaigns, and would not be satisfied if they were the nominees. But a poll from USAToday and Suffolk University, sampled in the last week of December, adds some essential nuance.
The pollster asked Republicans how enthusiastic they are about Trump as their nominee, “on a scale of one to 10,” and the same of Democrats about Biden.
As expected, Trump got far more 10s than Biden, 44 percent to 18 percent. But the average response for both was similar: 7.2 for Trump, 6.3 for Biden.
That’s because the Democratic feeling towards Biden is not especially unenthusiastic. In fact, Trump had a few more 1s compared to Biden, 16 percent to 10 percent.
About half of the Democrats rated their enthusiasm modestly, between 5 and 8, with another quarter going higher than that. Almost identical percentages of Republicans (78 percent) and Democrats (76 percent) pegged their enthusiasm for their respective frontrunner at five or higher.
Trump may have a core of more intensely cultish support than Biden—but not necessarily broader. Most members of both major parties are, at least, OK with how the race is shaping up.
This is for good reason. While the major parties are, as always, coalitions of interests with some diversity of views, Trump and Biden accurately reflect the sentiments of their parties.
In an odd Washington Post column by Ruy Teixeira that laments how “we are doomed to get Trump and Biden again,” he argues Trump “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.”
That is true, if an overly gentle way to describe Trump’s vicious rhetoric towards immigrants, the most consistent and animated principle of his political career. And it leaves out his Russia-friendly “America First” foreign policy vision, in which he would abandon Ukraine to free up resources for domestic use.
We should add that in the Republican primary, Trump is not only crushing it with working-class voters but also with college-educated voters, who compose about half of the primary electorate. Last month’s Quinnipiac poll has Trump winning a whopping 72 percent of the white non-college vote, as well as a 48 percent plurality of the white degree-holders, doubling up the second-place Haley, who has tried to resurrect Ronald Reagan’s traditional conservatism and hawkish internationalism.
Trump’s views are widely held among Republican voters. For example, a Pew Research Center poll from late November and early December found that 48 percent of Republicans think we provide “too much support” to Ukraine, compared to 33 percent who believe our support is “about right” or “not enough.” The December NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that 85 percent of Republicans want to build a southern border wall, and 59 percent don’t believe children born in America to undocumented parents deserve citizenship. Trump is the likely Republican nominee because of, not despite, his policy views.
Biden, Teixeira says, “represents a compromise between the activist left of the party and its moderate center.” True enough, but he goes on to argue that Biden “provides a patina of working-class appeal, while accommodating the priorities and rhetoric of the party’s activist contingent,” resulting in an “awkward compromise [that] keeps the Democratic Party together but has put a ceiling on its support.”
The description is the least charitable way to describe the sort of governing compromises that almost every American president does to woo both base and center. And it leaves out the ways Biden has rebuffed his party’s activist contingent: military support for Israel, tighter asylum rules (with more border security concessions to Republicans on the horizon), record oil production and lower gas prices, the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, and the rejection of single-payer health care. There’s a reason why Jill Stein, Cornel West, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are trying to peel away leftist voters from the Democratic Party.
Biden’s political strength has long been finding—sometimes by leading, sometimes by following—the political center of his party and the nation. The nuanced way he has handled many of these complex issues—supporting Israel publicly while pressuring it privately, cracking down on asylum while expanding humanitarian parole, historic investment in renewable energy while approving some fossil fuel projects—is reflective of the Democratic Party’s ideological big tent and proclivity towards compromise.
The primary challenge from Philips has failed to launch mainly because, as a moderate congressman, he had no significant policy disagreements with Biden. (His recent conversion to “Medicare of All” has done as much for him in 2024 as the exact conversions did for Biden’s rivals in 2020.) And Marianne Williamson’s left-wing challenge isn’t going much better. Whatever complaints one has about Biden’s record, no one can articulate an alternate platform that would have wider currency among Democratic primary voters.
Of course, many Americans are neither Republican nor Democratic, so the majority of the overall electorate is not fine choosing between Trump and Biden. But within the pool of unaffiliated voters, there is no philosophical cohesion.
USAToday/Suffolk also polled a fully multi-candidate trial heat: not just Biden and Trump, but also professional conspiracy theorist and political nepo baby Kennedy, far left candidates Stein of the Green Party and the independent academic West, Libertarian Party candidate Lars Mapstead and an unnamed “No Labels” candidate, referring to the centrist operation planning to field a bipartisan ticket. (Neither Stein nor Mapstead have secured their party’s nominations yet.)
The third-party vote splintered, with Kennedy taking 10 percent, most of the others claiming 2 percent, and Stein left with 1 percent. As Jacob Indursky explained for the Monthly last month, early poll numbers for third-party candidates are notoriously over-inflated. But putting the lack of predictive value aside, the polling indicates that no set of policies or political values unifies unaffiliated voters around any particular type of candidate. (Kennedy’s relatively high number likely comes from a mix of genuine agreement with his views and superficial name recognition.)
In nearly every presidential election, most independent voters recognize that they are effectively faced with a binary choice between the Republican and Democratic candidates, even though neither perfectly aligns with their views. They may grouse about it, but most rebuff third-party choices for a good reason: Presidential binary choices are healthy for democracy. Voters should be able to articulate which general direction they want their country to go without having that choice confused by spoiler candidates.
Most Democrats support what Biden represents. Most Republicans support what Trump represents. And there is no sizable group of voters seeking an alternative vision. We may have others who get on the ballot, but not because there is a groundswell of voters who subscribe to their platforms. In all likelihood, Trumpism and Bidenism are the only governing visions that voters will put on the table. Unlike some past elections, when poll-tested buzzwords obscured what’s at stake, the differences in 2024 will be apparent. And whatever happens next, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
