WASHINGTON —
In an election year plagued by uncertainties, one thing is clear: Americans see the November elections between US President Joe Biden and his main Republican rival, former US President Donald Trump, as a rematch, but even less attractive than the first time in 2020.
A survey of Reuters/Ipsos January showed that most Americans do not want Biden or Trump to run again and are tired of seeing the same candidates in presidential elections.
Trump is besieged by legal problemsand both he and Biden are seen as very old, although polls show that Americans worry more about Biden, who will be 81 on Election Day, than about Trump, who will be 78.
So why are Americans in this situation?
The short answer, according to analysts, is that both Biden and Trump want another term and operate in a political system geared toward favoring incumbents.
Trump for four more years
A second term could be vindication for Trump, who since losing to Biden in 2020 has pushed unfounded claims that the election was stolen from him, said Thomas Schwartz, a presidential historian at Vanderbilt University.
Trump’s critics accuse him of running not for the good of the country but to avoid going to prison, something he denies. trump faces 91 criminal charges under four indictments: for falsifying his business records in New York, withholding classified federal government documents in Florida and for attempting to overturn the 2020 elections in two separate cases in Washington and the state of Georgia.
These accusations have not affected his poll numbers, said Clifford Young, president of Ipsos Public Affairs in the United States.
“Trump has a very strong connection with his base,” Young explained to the Voice of America. “It’s almost indestructible.”
Returning to the complaints that resonate among MAGA (Make America Great Again) Republicans, Make America Great Again), Trump dominated the primaries (state-level voting processes in which voters select a party’s candidate who will compete in the general election) held so far. He is expected to handily win the rest, taking advantage of a system that amplifies the most ideologically fervent voices of the electorate.
This is particularly true in states with “closed” primaries where voters must register with a party before voting. The measure excludes independent and unaffiliated voters, and candidates win by adopting the most ideologically extreme positions. “There is an overwhelming vote for Donald Trump among Republican primary voters,” Schwartz told the VOA.
But even “open” primaries, in which registered voters, regardless of political affiliation, can vote for any candidate, reflect only a small proportion of the electorate. In U.S. elections since 2000, the average turnout rate in primary elections is 27% of registered voters, compared to 60.5% in general elections.
Biden wants four more years
Like any sitting U.S. president, Biden sees a second term as a vindication of his accomplishments, Schwartz said.
Biden won a series of legislative victories, led the Western response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and presided over an economy where recession fears have eased, growth and job gains are outpacing expectations, and inflation is cooling.
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“It’s possible that Joe Biden could declare himself a successful one-term president and step aside, that he simply doesn’t want to,” Schwartz said, citing Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, who decided not to run again in March 1952 and 1968. , respectively. “And the party is not strong enough to tell him to do it.”
Democrats see Biden as the best barricade against their biggest fear: another Trump administration, Schwartz said. If Trump hadn’t been in the race, he added, they would have been more willing to challenge Biden.
“What I’m hearing is we’re going with Biden,” said Democratic strategist Corryn Grace Freeman.
This despite progressives’ frustration over the president’s inability to fully cancel student loan debt and his response to the war between Israel and Hamashe said to the VOA.
“There are a lot of people who can’t support this president, who don’t like Donald Trump either, who just feel like the Democratic Party is constantly failing us,” he said, adding that support among African-Americans and Latinos “is starting to decline because to how this president has appeared.
Democrats are now caught in an extraordinarily high-stakes gamble in which a potential health or age-related incident could further discourage voters, Schwartz warned. But despite weak poll numbers and questions about his age, there is no Plan B for Democrats.
“No viable alternative entered the race,” said Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow in Governance Studies and director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution. “You can’t overcome something with nothing,” she told the VOA.
This notion was tested early, during the New Hampshire primary last January, which Biden skipped because he had promised South Carolina Democrats that his state would host the first primary.
The president was not on the New Hampshire primary ballot, but a majority of voters there wrote in on his behalf, scoring his landslide victory over two unlikely rivals, Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips and self-help author Marianne Williamson, who were in the ticket.
The system favors the prominent
Biden and Trump, both essentially running as prominent, have enormous influence over their party’s apparatus and resources. They also benefit from a primary system in which a small number of states have enormous influence and candidate choices are set long before the election, even if they become less popular.
The latter feature of the system is the unintended result of efforts to fix the former, said Geoffrey Cowan, a professor at the University of Southern California.
During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Cowan pushed for reform to ensure that voters in all 50 states were represented, replacing a system in which fewer than 20 states held primaries and caucuses and presidential candidates were largely selected by party leaders during their convention.
“I put together this commission that said that all delegates to the 1972 convention would have to be elected through a process open to full public participation in the scheduled election year,” Cowan told the VOA.
In ordering the primaries to be held the same year, the commission did not anticipate that state rules would evolve to lock in candidates early, even if voters’ attitudes toward them change, he explains.
Most states now require candidates who want to run in a party primary to register before the first week of the election year. States are also rushing to hold their primaries as soon as possible, a process known as frontloading.
This means that by the third week of February, it would be difficult for a candidate to launch a campaign against Biden or Trump even though the election is still more than 250 days away. Primaries have been held in critical states such as New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, and nomination deadlines have passed in many others.
This means that unless one of them drops out and the party rushes to nominate a replacement during the convention, Americans will be stuck with either Trump, who will be the Republican nominee defending the grievances of the MAGA movement, or Biden, because he is seen as the only one who can defeat Trump.
[Traducción: Luis Felipe Rojas, VOA, Miami]
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2024-02-27 21:30:23
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