Adam Smith: Historian

A version of the following piece appeared in The Sunday Times on December 31, 2023

Presidential election years have often struck Americans as deeply portentous. To Walt Whitman, the self-described “poet of democracy”, 1860 was “the year of meteors” in which “the comet that came unannounced out of the North flaring in heaven” augured a presidential election that was to trigger the break-up of the Union and bloody civil war. As it happens, there will be a dramatic celestial event in 2024 too. A total solar eclipse on April 8 will temporarily turn the day to night in the Republican states of Texas and Oklahoma, before doing the same in the vital swing state of Pennsylvania and Democratic New England, before heading into Canada and then oblivion. When the sun returns, one firm prediction we can make is that the state of America will be tumultuous.

The brightest meteor by far in the American firmament as 2024 begins is of course Donald Trump, who dominates every news cycle as few figures in American history have ever done. The first president to be twice impeached and the first to be criminally indicted, Trump has a formidable lead in the contest to become the Republican Party’s presidential candidate. Probably his closest contender, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, usually a highly disciplined campaigner, stumbled this week over a seemingly straightforward question about the causes of the Civil War from an audience member at an event in New Hampshire. Instead of mentioning slavery, Haley waffled about the war being “basically” caused by “how government was going to run”. She has since “clarified” her remarks by acknowledging that “of course” the war was about slavery, which may simply have annoyed all sides.

She and Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, remain 40 to 50 points behind Trump in national Republican polling. But all hope for them is not lost: the list of January frontrunners who have failed to win their party’s nomination is long and just conceivably, it could happen again. The Iowa caucuses, on January 15, are notoriously hard to poll. Unlike primaries, which run like other elections with voting at polling stations that are open all day and include early and absentee voting, caucuses are meetings held in designated locations at a specific time, in which participants discuss the candidates — often for hours — before deciding who to support. The Republican circus then moves on to New Hampshire for the January 23 primary. Any swing against Trump is most likely to begin in this traditionally moderate state. If Haley, having navigated her recent misstep, and with the advantage of huge late support from major Republican donors, can pull off an underdog victory, then the whole narrative of the year will be blown up. After a detour to Nevada, where the two are expected to win rival Republican contests, the next primary, on February 24, is in Haley’s home state of South Carolina. She would enter with momentum, and, perhaps, a growing, if begrudging, sense among Republicans that she offers a surer path to the White House than the former president.

By far the most likely scenario, though, is that Trump wins at least two of these early contests along with the Michigan primary on February 27. After March 5, “Super Tuesday”, when 15 states hold primaries or caucuses, he would potentially have won enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee. Might Trump’s numerous legal problems still topple him? The evidence so far is the opposite; he was in a far more vulnerable position within the Republican Party before the indictments. The first two of four criminal trials (in Washington, New York, Miami and Atlanta) are scheduled to start in March. If Trump’s lawyers fail to delay the cases (which include 91 separate charges), the spectacle of him in a court every day will represent millions of dollars’ worth of free airtime and based on past performance, his supporters will flood his campaign with cash.

Even if he goes to prison, which is very unlikely, there is nothing to stop him running, as the Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs did from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in 1920.

Other legal challenges are pending, too. Evidence amassed a year ago by a Democrat-run select committee of the House of Representatives suggests that Trump’s effort to delegitimise the 2020 election result may have risen to the level of “insurrection” on January 6, 2021. On Thursday Maine’s secretary of state ruled that Trump’s name cannot be included on the ballot for the Republican primary in that state (scheduled for March 5) because he is ineligible for the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution, which bars from “any office” those who have engaged in insurrection against the US. The ruling followed a similar judgment from the Colorado Supreme Court. Neither state is likely to be pivotal to the nomination race or the election (though Trump won one of Maine’s four electoral college votes in 2020). But the decisions have a bearing on pending legal challenges in dozens of other states. Two prominent conservative lawyers have also argued that Trump is ineligible, based on their reading of the original intent of the drafters of the amendment, who wanted to prevent Confederates from winning at the ballot box what they had just lost in battle during the Civil War. But so what? This is a case where the principle of the impartial rule of law clashes with the principle of letting the people decide. The Supreme Court will rule, presumably in Trump’s favour, and the relevance of the Fourteenth Amendment will remain, where it should always have remained, of academic interest only.

By mid-March, then, we will know for sure if Trump is the nominee in waiting, and, if he is, expect the vast majority of Republicans to swallow their reservations and rally behind him. There will be exceptions, of course, as there were in 2016 and 2020, and the irony is that Trump is almost certainly a weaker Republican candidate than most others in the field. It was not so long ago that Republicans used to argue for the importance of “character” in a presidential race, and there remain some naturally Republican voters who feel unable to support Trump for that reason.

And yet, as everyone in the US political world knows, the great advantage facing even a sorely compromised candidate like Trump is the weakness of his probable opponent. In 1979, as a young senator who had helped get Jimmy Carter elected as president three years earlier, Joe Biden held off backing him again because he wanted a nominee who would retain the White House. “I’m not certain that’s Jimmy Carter right now,” he told the Wilmington Evening Journal. Now he faces similar doubts.

One in three Democrats and well over half (56 per cent) of Americans do not want Biden as the Democratic nominee, an Associated Press survey found this month (Trump is similarly unpopular). According to Gallup, the polling organisation, Biden ends the year with an overall approval rating of 39 per cent, the lowest among first-term presidents 11 months before an election since the 1940s.

The Biden 2024 team simply cannot comprehend how a president who has instigated an economic recovery, re-established US credibility with allies shaken by the Trump years, and registered significant legislative accomplishments, gets no credit from voters. But they know the advantage of incumbency. They argue, correctly, that polling evidence ten months in advance of an election has little predictive value. They place their faith in the expectation that when voters have to make a binary choice, they will again vote for a calm hand on the tiller, not the probable chaos of a second Trump term.

One problem with this argument is that voters won’t, strictly speaking, have a binary choice. In close elections, third-party candidates can make a big difference, as Al Gore learnt in 2000. Polls show that Trump’s lead over Biden increases when minor party candidates (notably the former Democrats Cornel West and Robert F Kennedy Jr) are included.

What events in 2024 might strengthen the president’s hand? An improving economy? In an era of such intense partisanship, economic indicators seem no longer to have the political impact they once had. Foreign affairs seem only to be a minefield for Biden, who faces intense opposition from progressives over his backing of Israel and declining support for his rallying of a western alliance against Russia over Ukraine. Most importantly, news coverage of illegal crossings of the southern border and the busloads of migrants travelling across America can only, to put it mildly, be a political drag on Biden in the swing states he needs to win.

Biden’s strategists seem to be relying on the 2024 election being a re-run of 2020. That may be their best hope, but to many Democrats it is optimistic in the extreme.

Is it too late for Biden to emulate Lyndon B Johnson, the Democratic president he resembles in many ways, and announce, as LBJ did in April 1968, an election year, that he will not run for a second term? In the sense of allowing time for alternative candidates to mount a normal primary run, the answer is yes, it is already too late. In Johnson’s time, primaries mattered less. Of course, the brutal reality of human frailty may yet play a part. Johnson’s health, as well as popular opposition to his Vietnam policy, prompted his shock withdrawal. (In that year too, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy profoundly altered the trajectory of politics.) LBJ’s deputy, Hubert Humphrey, won the nomination and then lost the election badly to Richard Nixon. Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice-president, could yet face a similar fate.

However, if politics plays out in what now seems the most likely way, we will enter the high-octane presidential election season of September and October with Biden facing Trump. Even then, do not discount the possibility of a late-breaking wildcard, such as James Comey’s October announcement of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2016. In a close race, which this, surely, will be, every twist and turn assumes magnified significance.

Like the rare great meteor procession that Whitman witnessed in 1860, the intensity of this coming year may be both unnerving and impossible to avoid.