No one is inevitable
Salena Zito
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South Carolinian Lauri Lechner said when it comes to next year’s primary election for the Republican nomination for president, no one candidate is preordained as the winner. That includes former President Donald Trump, someone she said she voted for twice.
“It is entirely possible Trump is not the inevitable candidate on the Republican side. … I think a good number of conservatives support Trump in his policies, but they are fatigued with the man,” Lechner said.
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Her parents, Wanda and Richard Lechner, who live north of Wampum in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, are also “not so hot” for Trump this time despite their prior enthusiasm and Trump campaign signs displayed in their yard. Both are looking toward either Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) or Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) as their pick for the nominee, neither of which has announced his intent.
One Democrat from Washington County, Pennsylvania, said when Barack Obama ran in 2008 and 2012, he was really excited to vote for him. He also voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. And when Joe Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president, ran in 2020, he said that because of his years with Obama, he felt a level of comfort voting for him.
But today, he said he is ready to move on to another Democrat. “Not Robert Kennedy Jr.,” he said. “But I like our governor, Josh Shapiro, or the governor of Colorado. … I just don’t think Biden is the future for my party, and while it seems like it’s inevitable, maybe it’s not, or maybe it’s just wishful thinking.”
National Democrats have designed a nominating process that has made South Carolina the home of the first primary contest. South Carolina is the state where Biden found his footing in the 2020 primaries after losing in Iowa and New Hampshire. The Democratic National Committee currently has no Democratic primary debates scheduled on its calendar.
One year out from next year’s primary process in both parties, voters are very candid about their longing for anything but a repeat of the Trump-Biden matchup they endured in 2020 — an election mired in COVID, shutdowns, mandates, a completely absent Biden on the campaign trail, and Trump’s post-election outbursts.
A national NBC News poll finds overwhelming majorities of people don’t want Trump or Biden to run for president in 2024. A whopping 70% of all Americans, including 51% of Democrats, believe Biden should not run for a second term. Sixty percent of people, including one-third of Republicans, think the former president shouldn’t run.
Biden is a smidge more popular than Trump: 38% of adults have a positive view of the current president, compared with Trump’s 34% positive. In short, neither man should be receiving the inevitable treatment by anyone in the press.
In frank conversations with voters, Democrats and Republicans, across the country, voters expressed frustration that all they heard on either cable news, streaming services, or social media was a drumbeat about Trump and Biden. A healthy number of them wanted someone younger.
Many of these voters said they like one or the other but are ready to move on.
G. Terry Madonna, a political science professor at Millersville University in Lancaster County, said while he’s not suggesting that either Trump or Biden cannot win his party’s respective nomination, history shows that it is foolish to call anyone “inevitable” a full year away from the presidential nominating conventions.
“I don’t think we can assume anything at this point,” Madonna said. “We still have too far to go, and there’s too many things that can intervene, which could set up a real genuine battle. Right now, Trump and Biden are the leaders by far, but that’s not predictive of what could happen a year from now or even three or four months from now.”
Madonna notes that in the 2008 Democratic primary, Clinton was inevitable. Then, Obama came along.
Jeb Bush was inevitable in 2016 until Trump came along.
Howard Dean seemed inevitable for a time until John Kerry came along in 2004’s wacky Democratic Party.
“Heck, the expectation in 1968 was that Lyndon Johnson would breeze through the Democratic Party’s nomination that summer and then win reelection against whoever his Republican opponent was going to be in November,” Madonna said. Then, Johnson abruptly dropped out after nearly losing the New Hampshire primary.
Christopher Borick, professor of political science and director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, said he has seen the same sentiment from voters in his discussions with them. “It’s not showing up in the polling yet, but there is always this sense that even though they’re both the declared, a lot of voters aren’t sold that that’s necessarily going to be the matchup in ’24,” he said.
Borick said it is not just because of possible primary issues “but because of two major factors: one is Biden’s age and, two, Trump’s legal standing and his own aging factors.”
Biden, at 80, is the oldest president in U.S. history. Trump, the former president and the current front-runner, is four years younger.
Borick said both men won their races narrowly in one-of-a-kind election cycles, as weirdly different from each other as they were from anything that had come previously.
“Those last two elections and the outcomes were full of these fairly unique factors that shaped them and the outcomes,” he said. “We can’t read the future and know exactly what the fall of 2024 is going to be like, but in many ways, both Trump and Biden are the product of those moments. Which tells us something of what to expect.”
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Borick said Trump did not cause the populist surge on the Right. “But he sure knew to take advantage of it. And in many ways, for Biden, the stars also aligned. He’d been around American politics for a half-century and never found his moment. And when did he find it? As an antidote to Trump.”
Borick said that, for now, there is a real sense that it’s not inevitable that these two men meet again. “While both have strong supporters — particularly former President Trump, who has a uniquely passionate base — there’s a general sense among many Americans that they wouldn’t want to see this,” he said. “So that shapes … not only their belief that it might not end up there but also their hope.”