This week is what the US Congress called “The Tuesday next after the first Monday in November”, which means that this Tuesday – 7 November – is an “off-year” election day. There are contests for state house seats or governorships including Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Ohio and Virginia and races for mayor in metropolises such as Houston and Philadelphia.
The four-year Presidential cycle also dictates that the next US General Election will take place exactly one year from now on Tuesday 5 November 2024. The start of the twelve-month countdown has accelerated political activity.
A rematch of the last race for the White House in 2020, with Democrat Joseph Robinette Biden versus Republican Donald John Trump, is widely expected even though around two-thirds of American voters are telling pollsters they are dissatisfied with the candidates and already “exhausted” by politics. Both candidates suffer from perennially net negative personal ratings.
Trump and Biden are the racing certainties to fight it out. Their front-runner status is cemented by the formalisation of the timetable for the primaries. The closing date was last month to stand in the early New Hampshire primaries in January. The filing deadlines for the key contests on Super Tuesday, 5 March, will be reached by the end of this year.
The 2024 race looks more nailed on between these two old men than usual but past form suggests that it is not always wise to go with conventional wisdom one year out as to who will eventually fight it out with the voters and in the electoral college.
At this stage in previous cycles, the incumbent Lyndon Johnson was set to run for re-election in 1968 and Bobby Kennedy was a contender. Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton looked more likely to fight it out in 2008 than John McCain and Barack Obama. Some still called Trump a joke candidate in 2015.
There are only two ways that either Trump or Biden can be stopped from getting on the ticket. They could fail to win sufficient delegates to be nominated by their parties at their national conventions or they could pull out of the race.
Incumbent presidents generally sail through the nominations process. Until recently Joe Biden faced no meaningful challenge. The fringe campaign of 71-year-old Marianne Williamson, an author and TV personality who also ran in 2020, is in meltdown after mass departures of staff alleging “toxic” and “traumatic” behaviour. Last month a more credible contender, Dean Phillips launched his campaign. The Democratic US Congressman from Minnesota, aged 56, says Biden, aged 81, “has done a spectacular job” but “this election is about the future”.
It is far from clear if Phillips will make an impact. He is hoping to make a mark in the New Hampshire Primary. But this has become a rogue contest following an internal row in the Democratic Party. The DNC wanted South Carolina to hold the first contest on 3 February but the local party in the “Granite State” jumped the gun and went for 23 January. As a result, the victor will pay a penalty forfeiting delegates at the convention. If Philips can attract enough media attention by registering unhappiness about Biden with a decent-sized vote, it is just possible that he could begin to derail the president’s candidacy.
The modern precedent is not good for incumbent presidents who face notable opposition for renomination from within their own party. That was the fate of George Bush Snr, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman who all lost their bids to be re-elected. Each of these presidents faced deep ideological splits in their party ranks. Unless the Middle East crisis blows up still further that is not the case for Biden. The issue is his age and whether that makes him unelectable. Trump is only four years younger and has also shown signs of losing mental facility – but his age does not appear to be a major issue for his supporters.
In March 1968 LBJ pulled out, eight months before the election. As the Vietnam War flared and his popularity plummeted Johnson ended a speech with the so-called Sherman declaration: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party”.
Some Democrats are hoping Biden will do the same. “Only Joe Biden can make this decision,” David Axelrod, President Obama’s adviser wrote on X/Twitter. “If he continues to run, he will be the nominee of the Democratic Party. What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s?”.
Axelrod was reacting at the weekend to a bad set of one-year-to-go polls for the New York Times and Siena University which showed Trump ahead in five out of six of the swing states that will determine the presidency: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. Biden took all six in 2020 but now only leads in Wisconsin, where the Republicans will hold their National Convention next July. The president has lost support, particularly among younger black and Hispanic voters, not helped by his support for Israel in the current war. If he could win them all back he would be narrowly ahead. Compared to 2020 “too old to be president” has shot up in these battleground states from 39% to 71% for Biden, but only from 18% to 34% for Trump, whose “mental sharpness” rating has actually risen to 44%.
Axelrod considers the polls to be “not ‘bed-wetting’ but legitimate concern” for the Biden campaign. Jim Messina, also a veteran of the Obama White House, is more sanguine. “We just don’t know anything a year out,” he tweeted. Pointing out that in another poll “Biden leads Trump by 7 pts in a three-way race with RFK Jr.” Having dropped out of the Democratic race, Bobby Kennedy’s son and JFK’s nephew, 69-year-old Robert Kennedy looks like a viable spoiler independent candidate, currently siphoning away support mainly from Trump.
On the Republican side, the field is being whittled down in advance by the qualifying rules for the TV debates. Candidates need at least a steady 4% in opinion polls and 70,000 individual donors to qualify for the third debate this week in Florida. Only four are certain to make it onto the stage: Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie. Tim Scott, the Senator from South Carolina, is looking doubtful. Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson are out and Mike Pence has shut down his campaign.
Trump, of course, is not taking part in the debates. Neither that nor Christie’s “Donald Duck” jibe have dented his 70+% poll rating for the Republican nomination. His “Project 2025” second-term team are already planning to “exact revenge” on their opponents, justifying it by the 91 civil and criminal charges for which Trump has been indicted. “This is Third World stuff. ‘Arrest your opponent’. That means I can do the same,” Trump told a recent rally.
The various trials Trump now faces will certainly disrupt his campaign. On the eve of the Iowa Caucuses, he faces a defamation suit in New York from a woman who claims he raped her. The federal trial for seeking to overturn the 2020 election is due to start the Monday before Super Tuesday. The New York state suit over pay-offs to Stormy Daniels is scheduled for later in March. The federal trial for misuse of classified documents starts in May. The date of his trial in Georgia for racketeering is still pending.
There are also a number of legal bids to disqualify Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution for “insurrection or rebellion” against an office which he has held. Potentially these could end up in the US Supreme Court and be the knock-out blow barring Trump from standing. However, it would be legal for Trump to run a campaign from behind bars, win the vote and pardon himself for federal crimes on his inauguration but remain in a state prison at the mercy of a state governor.
It remains an active, if seemingly unlikely, possibility that Trump’s legal woes could knock him out of the race or turn voters in primaries against him.
It is also possible that Biden could withdraw at some point between now and the Democratic National Convention in August, which would then elect a new candidate. The convention is returning to the same city, Chicago, as the tumultuous 1968 Democratic Convention, when Hubert Humphrey was ultimately chosen to replace LBJ. Earlier that year Martin Luther King was assassinated by a white supremacist and a Palestinian American murdered Bobby Kennedy for his support for Israel.
In American presidential history, there have been six previous re-matches between the same candidates at a second election. The incumbent president went on to lose in four of them. Though, most recently, Eisenhower held on against Adlai Stevenson in 1952.
According to the New York Times this is the most important US election since 1860. That year Abraham Lincoln won. The Civil War followed.
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