Most pundits see the 2024 presidential race as a battle between the current president and his immediate predecessor. They could be wrong.
While the next election is 33 months away (a long time in politics), its contours are starting to emerge: People may want a new face as their next president. A recent Associated Press poll found that 70% of the electorate don’t want President Joe Biden to run in 2024. Good news for Republicans, you say? Not exactly. The poll also found that 72% don’t want former President Donald Trump to run, either.
These numbers are stark and unambiguously bipartisan. They indicate widespread weariness. By election time, will voters close the book on the Trump-Biden era? It’s possible.
It would serve each party’s interest to make a fresh start with nominees who are not stuck in the past. While it’s too early to tell who best fits this role, each side has available prospects, with more to emerge after this year’s midterm elections.
A Republican would need to appeal to Trump voters without assuming the former president’s personal negatives or distracting obsessions — and expand the party’s base among swing voters. A Democrat would need to duplicate the hat trick pulled off by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair: holding most of his party’s base while breaking with its ideological excesses — and focusing on a new direction.
In presidential politics, new faces often win. When Trump entered the 2016 race, few observers took his chances seriously. Barack Obama was largely unknown when he started planning a White House run. In 1960 and 1976, the new kids on the block (John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, respectively) picked up all the marbles.
Both parties are oddly in the same box: Their presumed contenders for 2024 (Biden and Trump) may be their weakest, each with negative ratings far exceeding their positives among general election voters. There is also the matter of age. At the end of the next term, Biden will be 86 and Trump will be 82.
Biden’s support has sharply declined since his election, especially among all-important independents. A recent Fox News poll found that only 36% of voters would reelect him and 60% want someone else. A Politico/Morning Consult poll found that an unnamed Republican would defeat Biden by 9 percentage points. Of course, there is no such thing as an unnamed candidate. But even against the flesh-and-blood Trump, the current president would face a tough struggle.
Should Biden not run and Vice President Kamala Harris seek the top job, she may be even less electable. The latest Harvard/Harris poll found Trump beating her by 10 points.
While most Republicans continue to like, even love, Trump, not all of them want to nominate him a third time. Trump’s renomination has the support of 49% of Republican primary voters, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll. But when you realize his lead over the GOP candidate field is a rather slim 49% to 46%, with 51% of Republicans not voting for him, it makes his 2024 position less commanding than pundits realize.
Admittedly, it won’t be easy to find new faces; they all have weaknesses and strengths like every other candidate. And it won’t be easy nudging old faces to step aside, although fear of losing may be enough to make that happen.
The kaleidoscope of presidential politics turns slowly, but shifts suddenly — and when it does, outworn conventional wisdom about a Biden-Trump race may float away as if it had never existed.
Ron Faucheux is a nonpartisan political analyst and the publisher of LunchtimePolitics.com, a national newsletter on polls.
