Heading into this year’s presidential election, the country is back where it started four years ago.
President Joe Biden is set to be the Democratic nominee once again. Former President Donald Trump is on track to win the GOP nod despite four criminal indictments, 85 felony charges, two impeachments, and a 1-1 record in elections when he’s at the top of the ticket.
With the exceptions of Trump’s hard-core base and, arguably, an “uncommitted” effort in Michigan by Democrats to put their thumb in Biden’s eye, no one is excited about casting a vote in 2024. The contest is one we’ve seen before, a rerun from four years ago that has already received more airtime than anyone would like.
Weighing casting a vote for an 81-year-old incumbent who has made history as the oldest president the country has ever had or the 77-year-old quasi-incumbent who is history’s first president to be impeached twice and be criminally prosecuted is as exciting as the trip to the doctor so many voters think the two candidates need.
In January, 67% of voters polled told Reuters-Ipsos they wanted to see a different matchup than the one they got in 2020. They said they were “tired of seeing the same candidates in presidential elections and want someone new.”
Those figures are perhaps marginally better than how the electorate felt about its options in April last year, when 70% of respondents said Biden shouldn’t run for reelection and 60% said the same about Trump.
But if the country is so turned off by the prospect of watching the oldest presidents duke it out yet again, why hasn’t anyone succeeded in doing something about it?
Republicans sputter
GOP challengers lined up, charged, and inevitably met the immovable object that is Trump.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) was supposed to be Trump without the baggage. He had a successful record in Florida and won big, while the rest of the promised 2022 red wave failed to materialize.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley represented an old-school Republican Party that was strong on foreign policy and was smart about keeping its ducks in a row at home. She, too, had experience as an executive and could even point to her successful tenure as a member of Trump’s administration.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ran as a strictly anti-Trump candidate. If voters were keen to jettison Trump in favor of someone who was still willing to fight, Christie painted himself as the clear alternative.
But each of them failed to make a dent in the insurmountable lead Trump started to build once he was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg last spring.
Democrats limp
The list of Biden’s challengers wasn’t as long, nor as impressive.
Spiritual guru Marianne Williamson started, stopped, and restarted her campaign, not because of how she was polling against Biden but because she was outpacing Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), a gelato magnate who has been agitating against Biden for months.
Phillips might be a serious legislator — he was a member of Democratic House leadership before he stepped down as a result of his decision to challenge Biden — but he was never a serious candidate.
He lost two contests to candidates who weren’t running — first in New Hampshire, where Biden supporters organized a write-in campaign, and then in Michigan after Williamson suspended her campaign.
Haley later swatted down his halfhearted attempt to convince her to join him on a No Labels unity ticket, putting an end to any semblance of a challenge.
The enthusiasm gap can’t be explained by mere apathy. In six of the 11 presidential contests since 1980, an incumbent has been running for reelection. Four of those reelection contests saw increased voter participation compared to the previous year, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab. And the last contest saw the highest turnout among the voting-eligible population (67%) since 1904.
So why the discrepancy? Are voters lying to pollsters, saying they desperately want anyone besides Trump and Biden and then lining up behind them? Pollsters could be wrong — again. Or there could be an entirely different answer.
Primary problem
The process that made this rematch go from unenviable to inevitable coincidentally began the year Biden was first elected to the Senate. Democrats shook the political world in 1972, wresting control of the power to pick presidential nominees from party elders and handing it to small slices of voters with the introduction of the current primary system.
“Now what you’ve got, because of the primary process, outsider groups use it essentially to launch hostile takeovers of an established party,” Henry Olsen, a political analyst and a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told the Washington Examiner. “And that’s what’s happened over the last 30 years, is that the Left has been launching a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party through the primary process, not necessarily the presidency but other races. And elements of the Right have been doing that.”
Prior to 1972, most primaries were contests to select delegates who would support a preferred candidate at the party convention.
Frustrated by the nomination of incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the 1968 convention, Eugene McCarthy’s and Robert Kennedy’s supporters revolted. They demanded reforms to the nomination process, eventually authorizing the McGovern-Fraser Commission that overhauled the selection process, increasing the types of candidates who can participate and centralizing power over the eventual winners in the hands of the most committed, partisan voters, as laid out by Steven S. Smith and Melanie J. Springer in Choosing Presidential Candidates.
In addition to forcing state parties to codify the rules for the selection of delegates, the commission also reduced the number of delegates who could be appointed by the state party committees; banned selecting delegates before the calendar year of the election; banned winner-take-all rules, allowing smaller factions to remain competitive; and threatened states that broke the rules that their delegates might not be accepted at the party convention.
The commission’s rule effects were felt almost instantly.
“The 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern, won only one state in the general election,” Smith and Springer wrote, “a loss that some regulars, as well as top labor leaders, blamed on a nomination process that allowed extremists to take over.”
Republicans soon followed suit, altering their own primary contests in line with Democrats, though they never banned winner-take-all contests, which has allowed candidates such as John McCain in 2008 to snowball and dominate later contests by winning early ones.
A system that was meant to democratize the selection process has, in some cases, empowered an incredibly small slice of each party’s base in selecting who will be the eventual candidate.
“There are a lot of people who just don’t go vote in the primary,” Olsen said, pointing out that during the last serious primary contest in 2016, fewer than half of general election voters participated.
Kaivan Shroff, a former strategist for Hillary Clinton, told the Washington Examiner that the effect of primaries on fringe candidates is especially potent in down-ballot races.
“You see people like Marjorie Taylor Greene or people that others would consider far Left … rise up because the people that get involved in primaries tend to be more involved in politics,” he said. “They’re the local people that care about a very specific issue and get their neighborhoods together and they go out. In a lot of these primaries, the turnout is not amazing. So it’s not that who’s voting in these primaries is reflecting the larger electorate.”
Shroff made the case the primary process is helping bolster Biden, especially following his efforts to tinker with the Democrats’ nomination calendar and move South Carolina to the front of the queue to turn up the voice of black voters.
And Democratic primary voters have resoundingly supported Biden — minus roughly 350,000 voters who cast “uncommitted” votes in protest of Biden’s support for Israel in a handful of contests.
For their part, Republicans in every state except Vermont lined up behind Trump on Super Tuesday, giving the former president a commanding-enough delegate lead to force Haley out of the contest.
The rules that make it so hard for challengers to emerge within the established parties have also successfully boxed out the rise of outside threats to those same parties, Eric Loepp, associate professor in the Department of Politics, Government, and Law at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, told the Washington Examiner.
“The rules of the game really matter,” Loepp said. “The system is really structured in ways that favor incumbents and in structural ways that favor the two major parties.”
Last week, No Labels affirmed it would move ahead and try to field a candidate to take on Trump and Biden — despite every big-name politician it was rumored to have approached turning the organization down.
If voters are pining for another option in the way polling suggests, the time for the rise of a third party should be now. However, the negative polarization that has proven to have so much control over politics and voter tendencies appears to be even stronger than the desire to nominate different candidates.
“This moment in history is a particularly bad one because the negative partisanship and the aspect of polarization out there is so robust that people are really, really willing to put up with a lot of stuff with their own party to make sure the other party doesn’t get anywhere,” Loepp said.
When people are more concerned about whether the red team or the blue team is winning, they are less likely to support the purple team, for fear they are lending support to a challenger or a spoiler.
Not a problem for the parties?
Masses frustrated with the options primary voters are foisting on them don’t have many options to remedy the situation. While it’s clear the party bases are happy, or at least content, with their options, it appears as though the parties themselves don’t see anything wrong with their standard-bearers.
The 1972 Democrats might have been frustrated with the base handing a nomination to McGovern, who went on to lose in a 49-state landslide. But there is little interest in the modern GOP or Democratic Party in exerting more control over the process.
Trump, in particular, has successfully remade the party in his image.
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel went so far as to drop her maiden name, Romney, to appease Trump. Even that didn’t keep her in his good graces. She stepped down as the leader of the party to be replaced by a trio of loyalists to the former president, including his daughter-in-law.
Trump has so much power over the party that he convinced Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has been a strong critic and hasn’t spoken with the former president since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, to endorse him.
State parties started lining up behind Trump well before ballots were sent out and even risked splitting apart as their leaders emulated his refusal to concede the results of elections.
As Trump has reshaped the Republican Party, Biden has simply become a master of disguise, morphing into whatever the Democratic Party wants or needs at the time.
“Joe Biden’s superpower, for his entirety of his public career, has been to find the middle of the Democratic Party and occupy it effortlessly, which always means he’s acceptable to everybody and excites nobody,” Olsen said.
Biden is a flawed candidate, but he has the benefit of running against a man who is at least equally as problematic.
Democrats acknowledge Biden is too old — but at 81, he’s only a few years older than Trump at 77.
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“It’s kind of like, ‘Could your girlfriend be prettier? Or richer?’” Shroff said of the Democrats’ relationship with Biden. “I’m sure a lot of folks would say yes. That doesn’t mean they’re not happy with their current situation.”
Biden doesn’t want anyone to compare him to the almighty, just compare him to the alternative. The problem is most voters want an alternative to this presidential race altogether.
Max Thornberry is breaking news editor at the Washington Examiner.
